


my darling, we are slow dancing in a burning room

by princelingzuko



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Angst and Fluff and Smut, Bisexual Sokka (Avatar), Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Enemies to Lovers, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Slow Burn, Sokka is a disaster, Zuko is a Prince
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-13
Updated: 2021-01-07
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:48:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 44,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26440675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/princelingzuko/pseuds/princelingzuko
Summary: In a divinely violent world ruled by draconian laws and a corrupt government, the Emperor’s son has been brought up to neglect tenderness and yearn for bloodshed.And a revolution is brewing.What Zuko doesn’t yet realize is that Sokka knows tenderness like the prince knows the art of war, and their stolen kisses make Zuko into not just a traitor to his own nation, but someone both better and worse than he was.(alternatively: a dystopian future full of neon lights and patrolmen in which Sokka belongs to the opposition and Zuko is at the other end of their gun.)
Relationships: Aang/Katara (Avatar), Sokka/Suki (Avatar), Sokka/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 179
Kudos: 149





	1. abuse of power comes as no surprise

**Author's Note:**

> Quick notes on the world: it's a somewhat futuristic mix of the Avatar's world map and... you'll see. The four nations are Ogni — the Fire Nation, Morye — the Water Tribes, Zemlya — the Earth kingdom and Vozduh — the Air Nation that, in this world, lies in ruins and has one sole survivor. Guess who.  
> Emperor Ozai's government has ruled a totalitarian regime over the nations for almost one hundred years after the First War. 
> 
> P. S. Names of nations taken from Russian words for the four elements.
> 
> I hope you enjoy this work and I love you all. Stay safe. <3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Opposition is a dangerous thing. But like all things dangerous, it is seductive in its promises.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First chapter is up! Tell me what you thought of it. Love you all!

_**CHAPTER 1** _

_I slithered here form eden_

_To just sit outside your door._

BOOK I

SOKKA

The patrols are out again.

Underneath the faint yellow flickers of the lampposts, their black uniforms gleam like snakeskin as they march onwards, a harmonious force capable of so much ruin that Sokka has to look away from the window.

They disappear in a few long, silent moments, with dust dancing around him and the blizzard mirroring its movement on the other side of the window. Sokka doesn't relax after they leave. Instead, he presses his forehead to the icy panes and wills the feverish burn to be washed away by the coolness of the glass.

His world has been ending for a long time, and their uniforms serve as a gleaming reminder that he is not living, but falling into the abyss, hour by hour. It is not long now, he thinks, before he reaches the bottom. He doesn't know what will happen then. Perhaps the ground will swallow him whole. 

His world has been ending ever since his father shook him awake one moonless night, his eyes wild in the dimness of the room, Sokka's cheeks still full and his legs still too short to reach the bedposts, and said, _"there's a gun underneath your mattress, Sokka. I want you to protect them. Do you understand?"_

_"Dad?" Sokka croaked, unsure of whether his father was the consequence of his untamed imagination, of whether he was dreaming._

_There were three entirely too real, thundering raps on the inlet of their aged apartment, and his father opened the door to leave Sokka's room — in the yellow light of their hallway, Sokka drank in the harsh outlines of his father's silhouette for the last time. The door was shut and locked from the outside, the key sliding underneath it in a gleam of silver. Sokka didn't dare to pick it up from the floor._

Then there were voices, hushed yet vicious, and his father was gone, and there was indeed the gun underneath his mattress, the metal real and unyielding.

But _this_ — this was years ago. He doesn't remember much of the night now. Was the hallway light really yellow? Maybe it was the electric white they have now. Maybe his father didn't shake him awake, but caressed his cheek like he would do on the weekends, the kids leaving the realm of dreams for the scent of eggs sizzling on the pan and endless spices from Gran Gran's cupboard.

This was years ago. And if his father is still alive, Sokka has no way of finding it out, not with the Altair listening in on every single one of his curt, low conversations with—

"Sokka?"

Startled, he whirls around. The lampposts don't reach into his room, but Katara's eyes are a light of their own, illuminating his room and his world. She is one of the only things he has left. Sokka counts his blessings in his head. Katara. Nox. His gun. The felonious details on his non-existent resume, complete with a few government crimes he is sure are punishable by execution.

"Can't sleep." Sokka whispers, once his voice is under control.

Katara steps further into his bedroom. Her hair is pulled back into the same braid she'd arranged this morning before kissing Sokka on the cheek and heading off to the school. His sweater hangs loosely off of her shoulders. Sitting down on his unmade bed gingerly, she pats the sheets next to her and offers him a small smile that loosens the knot in Sokka's chest. He doesn't remember what his mother looked like, but he's pretty sure that she watches over him from the sky with the same warmth that is swimming in Katara's eyes.

"Me neither." She waits until Sokka drops down onto the bed next to her before pulling out a miniature leather-bound notebook and a pencil. "How was work?"

Sokka watches as she scribbles a few unintelligible lines in the darkness. "Oh, you know. The usual. Someone ordered their coffee with peach syrup in it today. I had to ask them if peach syrup is really what they want, like, five times."

Katara chuckles, barely listening. She passes the notebook to him. The weight of it is familiar in Sokka's fingers.

"Well, school wasn't much better. Alaric still can't tell the difference between lock and look, and Momiji..."

Sokka isn't attentive either. It's a routine of theirs; you cannot be sure that the walls or the ceiling or your bedpost do not have ears. They talk nonsense to each other, non-sequiturs which are sometimes fabricated completely, anecdotes and accounts of their days, their thoughts pouring out onto the faded pages of notebooks as they do so.

_Any news on the Prince? Time of arrival?_

Sokka makes out the words in their absence of light.

He jots down— _tomorrow. word is he's arriving alone, if you don't count security. sometime in the evening. have you spoken to anyone of ours today?_

"... and I'm making french toast tomorrow morning, are you up for that?"

He passes the notebook back and grins.

"Hell yeah. With maple syrup? Like Gran makes it? You know, she taught me how to make it last week. The point is in the cinnamon. I don't know how she can tell which one's the fake one, though. Says it's something to do with the color."

_Only to Aang. We met at our second location. The one with the broken stop sign. Nothing too exciting. Rij said that he'd managed to hack into the other sector. Cameras are going to be cleared there, too._

"Ceylon cinnamon." Katara pushes her braid off of her shoulder. "Anyways. I think I'm going to try to sleep now." She ruffles his hair. "You're so going to need a haircut soon. Just let me cut it this time, not Gran Gran, okay? And don't you dare try chopping it yourself. Love you."

Sokka stretches out on his sheets and watches her leave, closing the door behind her. He knows that she'll be in the kitchen now, burning the pages of their notebooks like the incriminating evidence of treachery against the state that it is.

The hall light is white this time, and he's pretty sure that this isn't the last time he's seeing her.

In the sudden darkness of the room, he tells himself, _she isn't Dad. She won't be taken from me._

He won't let them.

Then why does his heart clench like that? Why is the gun under the mattress suddenly so real and tempting?

The world outside his bedroom is a product of war.

He doesn't remember Morye as anything but a menacing place, and it smells of curfews and raids and patrols and something wonderfully sordid, a maddening hope living within his own people.

He doesn't remember the world aa anything but a puppet whose strings are being pulled by Ogni, a nation that reeks of corruption and the abuse of power. By the Altair. By the Emperor. His abuse of power, however, comes as no surprise; it has been almost fifty years of the Altair's draconian governing. 

Like a spider, Emperor Ozai weaves his webs, — and Morye, Vozhud, the Zemlya Kingdom— they only exist as mere concepts in his realm. 

And now. And _now_. He is sending one of his own people down to Sokka's world.

_Zuko_.

The Prince's name injects a feeling into Sokka's veins that is not quite right, and it leaves him cold.

Never before seen, always hidden from view, — the Altair is an enigma, and it's members are unreachable.

No matter how he nurses the small mad hope that Nox is able to shed light into the bleakness of this world, Ogni, with its vines and it's poison ivy, can uproot it in one single motion.

Nox.

Sokka exhales and rolls onto his stomach, burying his face in his pillow. It smells faintly of Katara's shampoo, from yesterday, when they'd both laid in bed and stared at his ceiling and told stupid jokes to each other, giggling like little children, waiting for Gran Gran to be done with the sea prunes steaming in the pot.

Nox.

He whispers it to himself like a litany. Like it is the only prayer that can keep him safe. Faces flash before his eyes like sparks of sunlight, a bokeh broken only by his fear for their safety. Toph'a small face with her upturned nose and grey eyes. Suki's daring red eyeliner and soft stolen kisses. Aang's fading tattoos. 

Opposition is a dangerous thing. But like all things dangerous, it is seductive in its promises.

In a world where pleasure is perhaps only relief, Sokka knows that Nox is their only chance at placing Aang on the throne of a world that is both kinder and far more cogent.

It is comforting to know that this is the floor and Sokka can fall no further. It is comforting to know that from here, they can only build their strength. That their meetings in the back rooms of The Jasmine Dragon are not futile.

Untranslatable, lit up from within, a revolution is approaching, and Sokka holds its reins in his calloused hands.


	2. dumpling junior wears leather boots and it’s hot

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's a rifle aimed at the Prince's face. Is this what fucking up feels like?

**CHAPTER 2**

  
SOKKA 

"ABSOLUTELY NOT."

"But— _Katara_!" Sokka sputters, " _I'm_ the one who found out about him first! _I_ want to see him! I mean, who else? Toph?"

Somewhere to his right, he hears a cackle. "Yeah, I'd love to _see_ the Prince. Sign me up."

The room they're all huddled in is bathed in the glow of one single lamp, and it illuminates the faces of the group with a somber intensity. Scents of brewing coffee and steaming tea stream in through the closed door, and the tablecloth is a calming green color. These are the only redeeming qualities to what they call their meeting spot Number One — Nox has never been on the creative side, and they've steadily rejected all of Sokka's suggestions for better names. Number One? _Seriously_?

The room itself is not stuffy by any means, but when you try to fit a heinous blind wrestler, a restless teenager, a few others who are down for an argument which may or may not organically grow into a fight, and Sokka and Katara — who are _always_ down to fight, organic or not, it becomes difficult to maintain the privacy of personal space.

Especially with the finger of his sister which she is jabbing into his chest, voice dripping with accusation. "Yes, _you_. Because the last time you were sent to collect information, Dai had to erase all footage with a— a _five_ _minutes_ notice within the radius of _three_ _districts!"_

"That wasn’t entirely _my_ fault!" Sokka screeches, swatting her finger away viciously. He whips around to Suki, who is watching him with an unconcealed shade of amusement. " _Tell_ her! Don't you have—I don't know— other stuff... to do?" he finishes weakly. Suki raises an eyebrow. Sokka makes puppy eyes at her.

"Sokka—" Aang begins, but doesn't finish, because Suki finally flips her hair over her shoulder — Sokka loves it when she does that, looking down at him in the darkness of his room, the red of her eyeliner only a little smudged, her lipstick on his own mouth — and steps forward. Her hair look auburn in the flickering light, and her expression is something between remorse and defiance. 

The room goes silent for a moment. Sometimes, he thinks, Suki seems to be the only coherently thinking person in the back room of The Jasmine Dragon.

"Actually— I _do_ have things to do. Sorry, Katara," she turns to his sister, who, at the break of a shit-eating grin on Sokka's face begins sputtering, "but I can't. Not tonight, at least." She rolls her eyes at her on-and-off boyfriend. "And don't look at me like that, you dreadful creature. That one time caused us a _lot_ of trouble."

"Um, guys—" Aang tries again, only to be cut off by the unlocking of the back door. Cyn, another barista at The Jasmine Dragon and Sokka's right-hand man, pokes his head into the crack.

"Wrap it up, you guys," he hisses. "Sokka, there're too many of them. Come help." When Sokka doesn't move, he hisses, " _Now_. I swear I'm never covering for you again."

Sokka sends Suki what he hopes she'll interpret as a grateful glance and saunters over to Cyn. "What, you don't want to defeat the all-mightily, all-powerful Dumpling Senior? You can't brew one more frail, puny little cup of flat white for the Cause?" 

From behind him, Katara bellows, "We are _not_ calling him Dumpling Senior! _Honestly_ , Sokka!"

He whirls around. "Oh, we _absolutely_ fucking are. Dumpling Senior is my final offer. Now," he begins backing out of the room, "we all agreed that I'm the one for mission Dumpling Junior, right? Yes? No protests? Good. Perfect. See you guys after this. I'll tell you everything about our little Dumpling. Suki, I owe you one, baby—"

Cyn literally growls and hauls Sokka through the door by the collar of his serenely green shirt, tossing the apron into his face right after letting him go. The satisfied leer doesn't leave Sokka's face for a few minutes after he finally regains his designated post at the café counter.

It's _him_. _He_ gets to be the one to bring Nox the information they crucially need for the advancement of plan Number Sixteen. This time, he won't fuck up.

There's a rifle aimed at the Prince's face. Is this what fucking up feels like?

The sun has almost set, and the sleek, white yacht Dumpling Junior has stepped down from onto the unholy ground of Morye with his pristinely black and polished boots, is gleaming ominously in the weak rays of the dying day.

His arrival, Sokka knows, is going to be he talk of his little town for weeks. Everything about it is beautiful, in a perilous sort of way. In a way that makes Sokka wish it was Suki standing within the crowd of onlookers assembled to greet the heir to their ultimate destruction instead of him. A few are taking tentative photographs, and Sokka wishes Nox wasn't this paranoid of bugging and spies to not allow any of its members a cell phone.

The deadliest weapon is not the rifle fastened to the back of every single man in black neoprene that descends from the deck of the ship. It is not the looming ferry that hides in the mist behind the yacht.

It is Prince Zuko, his back taut like a wire.

Sokka is painfully aware of the glaive strapped to his own hip.

The Prince looks like a painting, almond eyes and fair skin, and hair the color of wet tar, top half collected into a ponytail and held together by a gleaming gold piece.

A symbol of royalty. A symbol of the Altair.

As he saunters closer to the crowd, his chin at a defiant angle, Sokka's brain finally registers the angry red tear in an otherwise perfectly painted canvas. The scar overlaps his cheekbone like a wave of crimson. A feverish blush that will never go away.

He finds himself entranced by the violent trajectory of it, deaf to the speech given by a slender man standing next to Zuko.

He almost loses it when someone taps him on the shoulder.

Startled, Sokka whirls around, eyes meeting the steely gaze of one of Suki's girls, Mai. Her midnight hair is hidden under a hood, red lips obscured by a nondescript scarf. Everything she's wearing seems to fit the definition of nondescript perfectly.

"Hi," she whispers, leaning close.

Sokka nods in response, wondering briefly why Suki didn't take one of her fiercest warriors to whatever _stuff_ she had to get done, but dismissing it as a question for later, for when she knocks on his door late in the night and asks if he has those strawberry filled muffins hidden at the back of his fridge and whether he'd like to trade one of them for a kiss.

"What are you doing here?" He asks, his eyes unwillingly drawn back to the way Zuko eyes his future subjects. From this distance, he cannot make out his expression. He's sure it's something that hisses _don't touch my crown with your filthy hands. Peasants._

Mai huffs out an amused laugh. "You mean to tell me you're not informed? Oh, boy."

Now she's captured most of his attention. Sokka has half a mind to keep staring at the Prince until he disappears into the crowd, or behind the backs of his guards, or— _why does something so assuredly deadly have to have eyes like that?_

"Tell me what?" He whispers.

"Change of plans. Dumpling Junior is being pierced right through with a chopstick. Or a bullet."

The momentary satisfaction of at least someone having unironically adopted his proposition for a code name is frozen is Sokka's veins as realization settles in its place.

_Right through with a bullet._

His brain short-circuits.

" _Mai_ ," Sokka begins, tentatively. "Please tell me you don't mean what I think you mean. You're not going to—"

"Poke the tender side of our little frail dumpling? Oh, fuck yes. Daddy dumpling is going to be so mad. Who knows? Maybe this will finally set things in motion."

Sokka watches in a haze as she starts admiring her nails, which are bitten down to the quick. His eyes scan the surrounding decrepit buildings in alarm.

Fuck. Fuck. _Fuck_.

He knows exactly who's behind the rifle as he finally picks out the telltale gleam of gunmetal on one of the faraway roofs. Because she never misses. Because she's this _fucking stupid._ Suki, with her thoughts careening into consequences like a speeding car into a wall. He loves and hates that about her, a complete disregard for any repercussions.

His fingers begin twitching. This is absolutely _not_ a situation he's prepared for.

In the distance, he can hear the booming voice of the Prince's suited companion. Something about honor and legacy. He zones out again, eyes never leaving who he knows is Suki on that fucking rooftop.

"When was this decision made? Why was I not told?"

"Suki and I kinda came up with it on a whim," Mai confesses, her voice only a tentative shade of alarmed. "What's wrong? I thought we were going to do this anyway?"

"Fuck, Mai, _no_!" Sokka hisses back. "This is bad. _Really_ fucking bad." He wishes he had a phone. A rock. Something to grab Suki's attention. Something to tell her that this absolutely isn't what she should be doing. It is way too late to try getting to her in time. "Don't you realize what this means? Don't you know who will _pay_ for this? Nox won't pay. The _people_ will. Mai, you fucked up. We're fucked. _Big_ time."

Nobody in Morye should have a rifle pointed at the Nation's heir when his own people can be inculcated for the assassination with this much ease.

His brain, finally having exited a stage of undiluted shock, startles into motion with a strange, single-minded focus. He knows exactly what he must do.

Sokka begins pushing himself through the disquieted crowd with his elbows, deaf to yelps of pain and curses. _Faster_ , he wills his legs _. Run faster._

The Prince cannot be killed. Not now, at least. Not when Emperor Ozai will have the people of Morye to blame. To execute in his rage. He is too important of a piece on the board to be rid of so easily. 

Zuko's face is lost to him, obscured by nameless heads of hair, shoulders, backs. Sokka's heart seems to want to leap out of his chest. _Damn you, Suki,_ he thinks _. You and your stupid fucking plans. On a whim?!_

Mai's amused laugh is a low rush in his ears, mixed with blood. He can feel the taste of it on his tongue, having been shoved in the face more than once on his way to the Prince. He registers the blows but refuses to acknowledge them as ones to his own person.

He breaks through the crowd with a startled gasp, air rushing into his lungs, unseeing to the threatening steps the guards seem to take to uproot him and haul him away from where the Prince is stood, slender arms folded over a deceptively narrow waist, one single eyebrow furrowed in confusion as he registers Sokka darting for him like a wolf might lunge for a rabbit. 

_Suki is dead,_ he thinks.

From this angle, Zuko is outlined by the weak sun like a storm shrouded by light.

Sokka takes a second to trace the way the hazy grey glow delimits the sharp angle of his jaw and plummets straight into the Prince's chest, the sheer force of his panic knocking them down, his knee landing painfully onto the asphalt between Prince Zuko's legs.

Suki is _so_ fucking dead.


	3. where death is certain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nobody looks at Zuko like that, full of mischief and divinity. Nobody saves his life with such gracelessness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know I said that I’ll update once ever few days but I saw this chapter in a dream so here

**CHAPTER III**

SOKKA

THE WORLD COMES BACK to him in shards of broken glass.

The body beneath him is a valley of tense muscles and sharp edges; the Prince writhes underneath Sokka like a serpent, and it seems to him that he can feel every arch of his spine with his own. It shouldn't make him this acutely aware of the hands gripping his forearms, long fingers digging into flesh, or the way Prince Zuko's face contorts with numerous expressions.

His almond eyes fanned by thick black lashes — one of them, at least — widen with something akin to terror, and then, as he thumps the elegantly rounded back of his head against the asphalt as an attempt to wriggle free, an intense wave of barely controlled fury.

It seems to Sokka that the Prince doesn't know why he is still alive. _Fuck_ , Sokka registers, _he probably thinks I'm about to finish him off._

It takes mere seconds for the guards to reach him and haul him off of Zuko as though he weighs nothing. He is hurled back to the ground, knocking the wind out of his lungs. The gasp that escapes him is a mix of indignation and what should be a string of imaginative curses, but there isn't enough breath for Sokka left in the world as he rolls onto his back and attempts to swallow down a wave of painful nausea.

Fuck this, he's never saving Suki's ass again.

"I saw a sniper on the roof," he tries to say, but his voice betrays him, and he's once again clawing at the air in an attempt to push it into his burning lungs. Through the ringing in his ears, Sokka makes out the crowd's gasps of infuriation and distress, both of them veils for the unhinged delight with which the people of Morye watch him topple over the son of their very own puppet-master. _Finally_ , he hears, _a show they can enjoy._

The Prince must have gotten up, because the grey sky is momentarily obscured by something with an expression so divinely vicious that it's Sokka's turn to wonder why he isn't yet dead.

If he is saying something, Sokka doesn't hear him. He tries again to speak, and it takes him several excruciating moments before he at last finds his voice. 

"Sniper," he finally manages, and the Prince snaps up like a wire that has finally broken, sparing Sokka one last glance of dubiety before being hauled behind an impenetrable wall of brooding guards, their guns pointing upwards. Sokka prays that Suki had gotten away in time.

One of them peers down at Sokka. In his gaze, he can see exactly what is thought of him; a nameless life worth less than the Prince's pinkie finger.

"Get out of here," the guards snarls, and Sokka doesn't need to be told twice. There's something hot and sticky running in rivulets down from his eyebrow to get tangled up in his eyelashes, and he's pretty sure that there's a gash on his forehead and bruises are blooming where he had hit the asphalt. _Nothing Katara can't fix,_ he assures himself, and forces his thoughts away from the whites of dozens of eyes that follow him as he pushes back through the crowd.

It's only when he reaches the end of the street when Sokka allows himself to collapse against a solid wall, running his hands through his disheveled ponytail.

Things have taken such a terrible turn that he's unsure of whether the door to his apartment isn't being torn down, Gran Gran's hands aren't being bound, and Katara's head isn't being forced into a sack, the two people he cannot bear to lose being taken away from him forever. Suki's betrayal stings, and the ache cannot be dulled by any of the stinging wounds he finds on his surface; she had gone off and placed the entirety of their work in jeopardy _on a whim._ Sokka wishes he knew her motivations with a maddening intensity.

Sokka groans, a sound so desperate that his cheeks flush. He had singlehandedly knocked down _The Prince._ He knows why Zuko has been sent here. He knows who who he had truly insulted by acting out of line.

His actions find no alignment with Nox's clear directions: _keep a low profile_. And yet — Sokka had saved the Prince's life. He was the only body Suki was willing to spare in her wild desire to destroy, to send Zuko kneeling over himself, a clear shot to the head. Suki always aims where death is quickest, where it is certain.

After what seems like ages, Sokka wills himself to get up. There's no use in hiding, he knows; this world is a place where you cannot stay hidden for longer than a few minutes.

Upon taking the final flight of stairs to the hall leading towards his apartment, Sokka's blood runs cold.

The door to it stands unlatched.

ZUKO

This is singularly one of the worst days in his life.

It's not because he'd had to travel a full week on a yacht where his only source of entertainment had been a stack of magazines nobody had bothered to change up since the last time he'd been here, and, consequently, had already inspected every inch of their pages. The rest of his library lies in mahogany chests in the cabins of the monstrous ferry ship tailing them. 

It's not because his father had sent him down to Morye a month before his own arrival.

It's not because Zuko hasn't been sleeping for the past several weeks, a haze following him everywhere, a constant reminder of yet another one of his limitations.

It's not because he can still sense the ghost of the Emperor's fingers wrapping around his throat. 

For the first time, he is seen by the world. And that first time is marred by his deviously inopportune tumble. He'd been knocked over by a man who looks no older than nineteen, right into the wrought iron grey of the paving. The snow had melted there, and the back of his head throbs with the memory of a sudden fall to the ground.

He covers his lashes with his fingers, forehead leaning against the tinted windows of one of Altair's sleek black vehicles, suppressing the pulsating ache beginning behind his eyes.

This is not how he imagined Morye. Ogni keeps no real-life photographs of the lesser nations, partly due to The Emperor's aversion to technological advances and thus all things technological, including cameras, but mostly because his father believes that the three other parts of the world governed by the Altair are undeserving of being admired, mirthless.

As his eyes skirt over the landscape opening up before him, Zuko catches sight of crippling grey apartment blocks, shattered pavements, and flickering lampposts in the blooming night.There are clouded navy mountains dancing in the far north, peaks glittering with blue snow. The people he sees, stopping, staring, — whether it is because of the vehicle's model or the occupant, the prince is unsure, — don rags in various states of deterioration, faded yellow beanies and patched-up thin leather jackets peeking through a curtain of brown coats and midnight blue scarves.

The Morye he had imagined was beautiful. Ruddy browns of mountain rocks giving way to a pristine white, snow layered by the sun, houses hidden by mountains, furs and suedes worn by citizens tanned by the rays of the sky and their own content.

It was what he had imagined whilst his father drilled their newest campaigning program into his head, unrelenting with the flow of information even after midnight, when Zuko could barely make sense of his own thoughts, or when he was alone, crumbs of brioche falling from his fingers and into the untamed swan pond. It was what he saw when he got tired of gazing over a city so devotedly militarized, so proudly ready for war.

The Prince had grown up within the heart of destruction, and he knew little else. And what he knew, he had probably imagined.

There are no blue skies in Morye. Nobody gazes in childish wonder at the passing car. And when someone steps meters in front of the vehicle, blocking their path, Zuko is almost unsurprised. He's trying really hard not to let his headache grow into a full-blown migraine, complete with self-induced retching and fits of temporary blindness.

Distantly, realizes that the driver isn't stopping.

"Stop the car," he says lowly, hands lowering from his face, peeling his forehead away from the window.

The driver must have registered his demand, but refuses to act upon it.

" _Stop the car,"_ Zuko repeats, desperation beginning to cloud his princely tone. They're going to hit whoever it is blocking their way. They're going to his someone. "Halt!"

Surprised, his driver finally steps his foot onto the brakes, and Zuko is thrown forward against the passenger seat. He hears the distant screeching of tires as the military cars behind him come to a belated stop and hopes he hadn't just caused an accident.

Unlocking the car doors with trembling fingers and refusing to register what could have just happened, he climbs out, the neoprene of his black high-neck finery a frail defense against the harsh northern winds that threaten to topple him over. Once again.

The snow crunches beneath his pointy boots as he makes his way over to the silhouette of a person. They're holding something up, he realizes, but is still too far and it is still too dark to make out whatever it is. The lampposts flicker and one of them fizzles out.

It's a boy, no older than eleven or twelve. He's trembling all over, much like Zuko, but in his eyes, he sees something so frenzied that he halts in his step. Behind him, the crunch of snow indicates that the guards have finally caught up.

"Prince Zuko—" one of them begins, but the prince tunes him out, almost petulantly.

The boy is dressed in a soiled brown coat a few sizes too large for his thin shoulders. There are streaks of tears running down his face, and they send chills down Zuko's spine as though they're running down his own back. The lower half of his face is hidden beneath a bandana, and in his hands, fingers blue and nails filthy, he holds up a sign.

_NOX IS COMING FOR YOUR THROATS._

"Nox," Zuko breathes, and his chest constricts as he realizes that the child had no intention of backing away from the car. _Fuck,_ he thinks to himself. _He was going to let us run him over._

"Go," he croaks at the kid. He can't find it within himself to look into his eyes. He feels the absence of familiarity like a khanjali twisting in his chest, and thinks, with bitterness, that it should have been Azula who has to deal with this. This _fucking mess._

The kid turns and bolts, poster forgotten on the ground. Zuko thinks that if he reads the words again, he might actually throw up.

Exhausted, he finds himself back in the car, speeding towards a hotel he has no interest in, to a night he knows will be sleepless, to a month he registers will be one of the most punishing in the entirety of his life.

The thing is, he knows that the Altair is not exactly adored by the three nations. No conquerors are ever able to capture the love of a nation that is now beneath their rule. Besides, it is always better to be feared than to be trusted.

Mindlessly, his fingers trace over the waxy skin of his scar, and he shudders.

But the extent of their hatred has always been concentrated in one word. _Nox_.

A group that is utterly traceless. Like any other forms of opposition, they are illegal, but it does not hinder their insistent existence, a presence so volatile that his father's eyes flicker with poorly controlled rage at their mention. And Nox has no desire of stopping. On the other hand, within recent years, they have spread like a tumor throughout the world, whispers on the radio found in static by his father's team of experts, footprints in the snow, and the memory of Vozduh, a nation burned down almost fifteen years ago, back when Zuko was still a child.

They are faceless, colorless, voiceless. They have no leader and no lead. They're nowhere, and it is because of this that they seem to peer at Zuko through the eyes of every defiant, traitorous member of every nation brought to The Emperor for an execution. They can be anyone and they can be no one. There can be hundreds. There can be thousands.

In his memories, _his father grips his shoulders, fingers barely snapping bone. Zuko attempts not to flinch._

_"Find me at least one. Find me all of them." He says. His voice is barely a sound, but it reverberates through Zuko like the distant waves of a passed earthquake. The Emperor's voice is a fever on his face. "Once I am there, you can have your throne. I can't have you be placed on a royal seat festered with worms."_

Nox studies him through the eyes of the boy who had knocked him over, arms caging him in. Strands of roughly chopped brown hair have tumbled out of his ponytail and tickle Zuko's face. His eyes are a blue mirror of his own — a terror that has no name. He looks like a mannequin of wickedness, white necklace peeking through a deep blue bandana wrapped around his neck.

Nobody looks at Zuko like that, full of mischief and divinity. Nobody saves his life with such gracelessness.

Zuko prays that the waves of his migraine are enough to close over his thoughts and drown them.


	4. asleep or awake, you dream of me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I want to please you, he says, his hand on the weapon strapped to Sokka's thigh. Will you let me?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: reference to scars, mention of child abuse, mention of murder(?) 
> 
> Every comment this au gets makes me feel like it’s Christmas morning so thank you. I love you. Sorry for updating literally every day I can’t stop writing

CHAPTER 4

SOKKA

Sokka moves slowly, steps muffled by the tattered carpet of his apartment. Someone is definitely in his rooms, as he can hear the scuffling of doors and cabinets being opened and swung closed.

He sends a silent prayer up to the sky, thanking his luck for Katara's decision to make her way over to Aang's most recent hideout, Gran Gran included, though, Sokka believes, mithering their entire way over, to, in her words, " _stay away from this whole mess and finally teach him my trademark five-flavor soup— properly_ ".

He wishes he'd had something better than a close-range weapon, such as the khanjali strapped to his thigh just moments ago underneath his jeans, to defend himself. Or to attack first. This world, Sokka knows, responds better to displays of violence.

Sokka grips the hilt of the dagger in his hand, the sharp edges and curved spine of it having to make do, and refuses to register that his fingers are trembling slightly, that the muscles in his shoulders are aching from being thrown to the ground.

With an uneven battle cry — he'd been silent his entire way home — Sokka dashes into the doorway of his apartment, khanjali in his right hand like a sword. 

The cry crawls back into his throat as he registers the scene before him.

Tens of cupcake wrappers litter the floor of the kitchen he has to enter on his way into the rooms. He almost trips over an empty plastic cookie tray, feet catching it with a grazing crackle. Within the mess, feet pulled up to her chin, her hair a tangle of auburn spirals and twists, sits Suki, her teeth digging into—

"Is that the last of the _cream cheese topped ones!_?" Sokka wails, relief and terror washing over him in waves that threaten to kick the floor from under him and swallow him whole; he had seen too much of her face today, and too much of it has within his mind become associated with a dull twinge in the region of his rib cage.

Suki has the decency to look guilty as she freezes in place.

Sokka lets the khanjali slip though his fingers and clatter onto the floor with a metallic ringing. For a few seconds, he's unsure of what his following actions should contain — a tone of solace, an accusation? Should his tongue be shrouded in dejection? Should he note that these cupcakes cost kisses? He wants to do all of the above.

"I can explain," Suki begins hurriedly, setting the cupcake down onto the table next to his favorite mug, it's walls covered with rings of dried coffee.

Sighing, Sokka crosses his arms over his chest.

"Go on, then."

She pushes her hair over her shoulder, lashes flickering down to the tablecloth and up to his eyes over and over as she ponders over what to say next. He can see the words threatening to spill, right at the tip of her clever tongue.

Suki's distress is evident; he has never before been the one to cause it, even partly. 

"I— I'm sorry for coming here, first of all." She smiles apologetically down at the empty mug in her restless fingers. They skim over its ridges and cracks, creamy porcelain beneath the hands of an assassin. "But I was— well. Stress isn't the word for it, is it?" Finally, her eyes travel over to find his, firm and only a little bit panicked. "But I had my reasons, Sokka. For all of it. I knew you wouldn't approve, so Mai and I—"

Sokka's almost had enough. "Approve? Fucking— _approve_!?" He grips the edge of the table, wishing he could crush it with his bare hands. "You were about to—" He exhales and thinks, _I cannot even speak my mind in my own home_. "Did you even stop to wonder what they'd do to you— what they'd do to _Morye_?" 

She flinches away from his tone as though he'd slapped her. Instantly, Sokka wishes to take the decibels ofhis voice back, to replace it with cold detachment, but he's had far too much shit go wrong today to remain detached.

"I had my reasons." Suki doesn't break her eyes away from his glare. They go wide momentarily, traveling up and down Sokka's face. "Your forehead—"

He shakes his head, regretting it instantly, and attempting, in vain, to hide a wince. "Not important. Now's the time for you to tell me _why_."

With that, he turns around and rummages through the cutlery cupboard with shaking fingers. They keep empty notebooks everywhere around the apartment specifically for cases like this.

Sokka slides a red velvet notebook and a blue pen down the table, towards Suki.

He tells himself to ignore the way she fidgets with the cup nervously. What he needs right now is an answer; something to latch onto so that he can forgive her and let this go. He prays that her reasons are good. Because if not— if not—

Sighing, she takes the pen. "Because I wanted to," she says lightly. _There_. Now the ears the walls seem to have lately have gotten their answer. It's time for Sokka to have the real thing.

He watches her scribble over the paper, hand pausing and resuming, teeth biting her red-tinted lip. Crouched over the notebook like this, like a schoolgirl, she looks so young, and something painful latches at Sokka's throat. He realizes, with a clear intensity, how young they all are. Suki is not even nineteen.

She's already killed more people than could fit into his apartment, back to back, a clear shot and a quick death.

He pulls out the chair and sits, willing himself to still.

At length, with the heaviest of sighs yet, she slides the book back. He sees that the page is completely covered in her slim, tight handwriting. 

Sokka's eyes begin to skim over the lines.

ZUKO

The hotel suite — the Emperor suite, it is called — looks like nobody had lived there since it had been built; the bedsheets smell faintly new, the plush navy carpets look unwalked on by mortal feet, — even the mirror holds a strange, alien stillness; but perhaps it's just Zuko's expression on his face. 

The concierge, a middle-aged tanned man with a nose ring, two braids woven into his ponytail, and a missing name tag, allows for the guards to locate themselves in the rooms adjacent and next to the prince's suite. Upon being informed that most of the luggage is yet to arrive, his smile falters, but he assures Zuko that there's indeed enough space for his books, for his robes, for his hairpieces and his sword collection — the one gift Azula had once bestowed upon him in the middle of the day, when they were just teenagers, — and that gives him a faint relief.

Zuko curls in on himself on the king-sized bed when they're all gone. His head is shrouded in a half-forgotten shade of pain; the migraine has strangely subsided ever since his arrival.

As he unzips the fastenings on his bulletproof vest, slim and flexible, having been made specifically to fit his narrow build, his thoughts wander back in time over to his arrival, which now seems centuries ago. As the glitteringly new lush shower curtains slide to reveal a marbled cabin, he traces the fingers of his mind over the crystalline outline of his attacker's jawline, and hopes, with a bittersweet pang in his chest, that the boy never finds out that he'd been wearing a bulletproof vest this entire time. Halting, his hand on the gold-encrusted faucet ( _absolute tastelessness_ , Azula would say,), he realizes that it would not save him from a shot to the head.

If the boy wasn't lying, he'd just had his life saved by a stranger.

Zuko lets the shower's scalding rivulets drown out the dangerous allusion his thoughts are threatening to give into.

  
  


Every night since the accident, Zuko has fallen asleep knowing exactly what is to come. And yet, every night, he wakes up with the weight of an untraceable, unavoidable terror sitting on his chest, breaking his ribs, crushing his lungs.

_The table of the Military Chamber is littered with yellow-looking sheets of maps, documents, both disclosed and under severe orders to never be so, and it heaves under the enrobed arms of generals, colonels and lieutenants, adorned with cuffs bleeding rubies and embroidered with a strangely ethereal golden thread._

_His father's robes are the bloodiest, however. The blood is invisible, but Zuko sees it now, in the realm of his nightmare, clear as though it was real, and iron fills the air, thick and suffocating. His sleeves leave tracks over the pages as he twists his face into a mask and orders for Zuko to stand up and explain himself, the latter’s sudden outburst raising a set of balding heads._

_The world tilts off its axis as he does so. He wants to wake up. He wants to—_

_"The town of Oyaji—" Zuko begins, his voice hoarse, alarm like cotton on his tongue, "is perhaps not the ideal target for your presumed military advancement. Your Highness," he adds, hastily. "The general population consists mostly of peaceful citizens—"_

_"That is enough." His father doesn't spare a glance his way, but Zuko already feels the blows of the cane on his back. The cane — if he's lucky. The oldest of the servants — if he prays really hard._

_He knows how the dream goes. He has a vivid recollection of it every time he catches his reflection in a mirror, in a river, in a swan pool._

He knows how it goes, and yet, every time the acid spills over his face—

The moon is brighter than any sun when he jolts awake, pillow stifling his desperate, painful scream. It spills onto the bedsheets Zuko clutches in his fists as he attempts to breathe instead of retch, spine arched into the mattress. The ghost of his father is still over him in the shadows, watching, and the moon is powerless against the darkness within the sharp outlines of its silhouette.

SOKKA

_The Emperor had my town razed to the ground._

Sokka stares up at the ceiling. Suki is long gone, but he feels the heaviness of her gaze on him still, unwavering, as though he's back in his kitchen, reading the product of her thoughts, their humble invader. He shouldn't know this. He should have known better than to make her write it all down.

Without Katara or their grandmother, the apartment feels strangely lifeless; Sokka, despite knowing that, couldn't force himself to ask Suki to stay. She was always eager to fall asleep to the rise and fall of his chest, but not tonight. Tonight, he knows, she'll be wrapped up with Mai, whispering tales and secrets into her ear. Telling. Spilling. Recounting.

_To the ground_. So she'd decided to head off and shoot his son in the head the first chance she got.

Suki's trauma, he knows, cannot be drowned by the blood she wants to revel in. Zuko's lifeless body on the asphalt won't unburn the stones of her town's skeletal remains. 

It is immeasurably difficult to try to lead with kindness when bloodshed is all they know. When Suki comes to him at midnight, and there are splatters of blood on her cheeks as she kisses him. When Katara blinks away the sorrow in her eyes as she lathers ointment over his bruises, too angular not to be caused by the patrol's baton, and knows not to ask.

He knows it like he knows the location of every prison in his city, like he knows that his father is not in any of them; he knows that their revolution will be the darkest shade of vermillion.  
No matter how many princes he saves, and no matter how many of themlook up at him with their almond-shaped eyes and blushed cheeks, their lineage is tainted, and they are the mere tributaries to the river of bloodshed their fathers have spilled. 

In his dreams, Zuko leans over him.

_I want to please you_ , he says, his hand on the weapon strapped to Sokka's thigh. _Will you let me?_

The knife in his hands is dark amber, just like his eyes, but Sokka's blood as he drives the knife into his throat is a true, untainted crimson.


	5. dark times call for quality cinnamon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zuko doesn't know why his cheeks feel so warm; the scarf and the change in temperature must have gotten to him, because, as Sokka leans even closer, oblivious to his state, he finds it difficult to exhale. 
> 
> "Maybe someday," Zuko chokes out. There is no someday, he thinks, suddenly and terribly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you like this! Love you all and I hope you guys are all well and safe <3

**CHAPTER IV**

  
ZUKO

He wakes to streaks of faintly grey sunlight painted over the blue of his sheets. Everything in the suite, he notices for the first time, without the warm glow of the lamps to distract him from the color scheme, is a cool blue hue. A blue design snakes down the walls like vines, waves crawling up to shore. The satins he fell asleep on unceremoniously, still in his bathrobe, are a vivid cerulean, and his pillows don a deep shade of the sea.

It makes Zuko fraught with unease, this coolness. He's used to waking up to reds and the sun drowned out by the massive curtains on the windows of his bedroom. There's too much air in this room, and he feels as though he is suffocating. Hadn't the shadow of his father been standing by the carefully carved wooden ridges of the same bed he's respiting in mere hours ago?

As Zuko sits up, the back of his head responds with a half-forgotten ache which he decides to ignore in favor of inspecting the suite. The carpet under his feet is devilishly soft, and, as he walks through a set of arched glass doors, it gives way to a cool, white marble.

It is a different world, this suite, so contrasting to what he'd seen yesterday. So ready to deceive.

A wide wooden kitchen greets him, its panoramic windows drowning in Morye's landscape: a wall of blue mountains drowned by bruising clouds that hang low. In the faint morning sunlight, that rises from somewhere beneath them, the snow on the mountain's peaks glitters blue, and for the first time, Zuko's envisions of the place match with what he's seeing, nature unmarred yet by the hands of man— his father's hands.

A faint suspicion grows in him as Zuko surveys the kitchen. If there's a kitchen— that means—

"No breakfast served here," the concierge, whose name, Zuko's learned, is Eska, repeats the prince's distraught question. "There're a lot of cafès downtown, I'm sure, Prince Zuko. Something will certainly be to your liking. You must have noticed that your suite has a kitchen. Lucky for you, Your Highness, there's a market close to the hotel. Perhaps you favor cooking for yourself? In the meantime, we could rearrange your rooms, bring in your remaining possessions. They arrived last night."

Zuko's about to remind him that he has never, _ever_ , had to cook for himself, but bites his words back. Eska's braids have fallen out of his ponytail and frame his face in a way Zuko has never seen back in Ogni. It's a careless thing to do, a thing worth being smacked over the head once or twice for.

Back in Ogni, that is. Here, in Morye, he has no chef making him omelette, and no orders from his father to have his hands slapped by an intricately designed collection of thin bamboo sticks for letting his hair down. In Morye, he will have to cook for himself, comb his hair the way he wants it to be combed, and maybe even—

"Your Highness?" Eska's face is pinched in a worried sort of manner. His eyes skim briefly over the — _fuck_ , over the bathrobe Zuko's still wearing. _In an informal sort of manner,_ Azula would interfere _. Servants have no business worrying over why we're crying or who we fuck._

"That will be all," Zuko says faintly, and lets the concierge close the door behind him on his way out of his chambers.

Then, he returns back to his kitchen, arms folded over his chest.

He knows with a sure certainty that cafés and restaurants in Morye, at least for the time being, are a luxury he cannot afford. Yesterday showed the people's readiness to— what? Obtain a twisted revenge for their submission to the Altair's rule?

 _They would have rotten without us,_ his father would say. _All of them._

But a _market_. Such a simple thing, so full of new experiences. The possibility of anonymity provided by hiding in plain sights is alluring, to say the least. A chance to see Morye for what it is. To erase the image of the little boy in the middle of the road, waiting for a government vehicle to crash into him.

Satisfied with at least having made one decision, damned be the outcome, Zuko walks over to his closet, partially unpacked by three of Eska's helpers while he was reassembling the guards to their respective rooms. There, in the midst of burgundy robes and embroidered hoods, hangs what seems to be at a glance a mass of brown tattered rags.

Back in Ogni, while his father was away for visits of a strange secrecy, Azula would grab Zuko's hand and sneak him out of the castle and into the bustling streets of their hometown. They'd spend hours marveling over shacks that sold gold-coated trinkets and stalls full of exotic fruits, unrecognizable in their frayed brown coats and sweaters with hoods a little too big for their faces, shadowing their royal features.

_Perfect_ , Zuko thinks.

The sky hangs heavily above him as he sneaks his way through the alleys, his guards, guns hidden by obscure tattered robes, a few meters away, strolling a little too leisurely to be acting natural, but Zuko cares little for their artistic talents or the impending storm, or even for the cold not even the coat can protect him from. Distantly, he wonders if he should have brought his gloves.

He is outside, and there's nobody to pull him away from any stands or any windows, any stalls, entreating him with the variety of their unseen produce. The market itself is a bustling collection of open-air tents and stands, and no matter their unalike contents, the principle is still the same: an escapade for a prince who'd never seen a nation that did not have tanks and war machines parading around in the light of day as though it were proud of the corpses it had created.

Zuko makes sure his scar is well hidden behind a pair of old tinted visors and a scarf wrapped around his face, reaching his eyes. His hood hides the glossy black of his hair.

He is a nobody. He could be anyone.

It is thrilling to think this way.

He speaks little the first few minutes, making his way through the tents slowly, reveling in their offerings and boons, drinking in the sight of the people around him, so different in the morning light.

It seems as though he'd gone to a past that has never before been disrupted — there is nothing modern about this place, about this market. The men and women around him wear strangely crafted fur coats and the hair that is not hidden beneath hoods not dissimilar to his own is collected into braids, intricately beaded by blues and creamy pearls that can only be found in the northern sea. They wear them out of need, unlike the bejeweled golden hairpiece Zuko'd used this morning to clasp his hair into a low bun.

The tents of the market are a sight of their own. Spices sold in huge containers, colors he'd never seen before, amulets with long white feathers hanging on beaded strings, snow peaches and wooden figurines flash before his eyes as he sets to still his racing heart. Stopping dead in his tracks to a particularly interesting pile of lemons that resemble yellowed hands, Zuko finds himself entranced by the peculiar yet mouthwatering smells of fried dough, and is drawn quickly towards a plump man with crinkled eyes, stirring a pot of sizzling oil.

"What is this?" He asks quickly, lowering his voice by an octave just in case.

There's something of the amused in the man's response.

"Fried seafood, son. Freshly caught at that," he says, smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. "I like your glasses. It's all sunny this time of November. Five crown notes apiece. How much d'ya want?"

"Three will be fine, thank you," he says, taking out the notes from one of the inside pockets of his coat. Once the man has picked out the pieces and pierced them through with wooden sticks, Zuko continues, "Uh, do you have a bag? I don't think I'll be able to eat them right now."

The seller scoffs. "Tourist, aren't we?"

Zuko's voice barely betrays the momentary panic he feels. "No, uh, just passing—"

"'It's no matter to me," the man says, his eyes are full of mischief,

"but next time, you gotta eat them right hot, got it? They're no good once the batter's gone all soggy."

The moment the warm brown paper bag, already seeping through with grease, touches Zuko's numbing fingers, he drinks in the smell like nectar. _Breakfast is served._

"Thank you," he says with eagerness, tucking it under one arm. 

"Come back next time and try them hot!" The man bellows behind him, and Zuko cannot fathom why he finds his discomfort this amusing. Does he really stick out like a sore thumb?

He peers down at his coat. It looks just like everyone else's, with the exception of any fur, and that plays to his disadvantage — Zuko didn't expect it would be this cold.

Which is stupid. This is the north, and the snow crunches under his boots just like it has done last night. 

His gaze is drawn back towards the lemons. A slice of one of those would do nicely with the tea his uncle had packed with such care several days ago. Noticing the way he'd stopped right before it, the vendor behind the fruit stand goes ecstatic.

"The Emperor's hands, only fifteen crown notes apiece, sir!" He raises his voice over the crowd's chatter. Zuko, momentarily appalled by the name, strains his ears to discern the rest. "Horned melons are on sale, and these wild strawberries and sugar-apples 're back this month."

He stares dumbly at the lemons. "Emperor's hands?"

He's not sure the vendor, whose hair is shaved partly in a strangely symmetrical pattern, hears him, but he does. Smiling widely so that Zuko can count all three of the teeth that are golden, he repeats, "Fifteen crown notes a hand, sir."

" _Fifteen_!?" blares a voice behind him, and Zuko twists around to see—

_Fuck_. 

It's _him_. The young man looks even younger now, wearing nothing atop a sweater but a light parka with its hood trimmed by white fur. His head is shaved on both sides, Zuko realizes, and not even the shading of the prince's visors can dim the disconcerting blue of his eyes as he widens them in indignation. Belatedly, Zuko realizes that he's blocking his path towards the stands. If he could just slip away—

"Not talking to you, boy," the vendor says, and there's a shade of familiarity that makes Zuko halt. "Scaring away the customers again? The curcuma's in Koa's tent, but tell your gran it's the last batch for the month," he leans over the stand, eyes on the young man, Zuko forgotten. They look at each other like old friends. For all Zuko knows, they are.

The boy throws back his head in a short laugh, and Zuko's eyes are drawn to the underside of his jaw exposed by the sudden movement.

"Yeah, yeah. But fifteen crowns for a _lemon_? That's a crime, Yakone, don't you know?"

He turns to Zuko suddenly, the warmth in his smile a remainder of what it was, but it matters little as Zuko flushes underneath his disguise.

"And you?" He cocks his head to the side, an easy smile dancing on his lips. "Haven't you ever been to a market before?" 

Zuko remembers the way he'd looked at him, the sky grey behind his shoulders. He remembers the hair that is now collected messily into a short ponytail tickling his forehead.

"I have," Zuko replies, his voice a mere rasp. He's terrified, and it has nothing to do with the fear of being discovered and everything to do with the way the boy's eyes are every shade of his bedroom back at the suite. 

"So you weren't about to spend fifteen crowns on a lemon?"

Zuko wants to tell him that fifteen crowns are nothing. "...No?" He says, and it's more of a question. The boy's smile widens in amusement.

Realizing that he isn't going to get any money out of Zuko, the vendor grumbles something under his breath and goes back to sorting through the snow peaches in a wooden box.

The boy watches Zuko observe who appears to be Yakone a few moments too long before speaking again.

"Sokka."

"What?" Zuko says, his eyes back on the boy, who scoffs.

"That's my name."

_Sokka_.

There's a pause, in which Zuko realizes, with sudden alarm, that Sokka is expecting him to give his name in response.

"Uh," he falters. Fuck. "Z—" he exhales. " _Zee_."

He waits for the ground to swallow him. _Please_ , he prays. _Do it._

But it doesn't. And, despite the furious stillness of Zuko's shoulders, and the way he'd forgotten every common courtesy and every form of speech imaginable, Sokka nods and holds out a gloved hand.

Zuko shakes it with his own. The boy's grip is firm.

"Sunglasses but no gloves?" Sokka asks, a non-sequitur.

"You ask a lot of questions," Zuko mutters, breaking the handshake, and the corners of Sokka's mouth twitch.

A gust of cold air seeps deep beneath Zuko's coat and rustles the fur of the boy's parka.

"So I've been told. Do you like spices?"

He doesn't wait for the prince's reply. Gesturing luringly with the flick of a wrist, he moves past him and back into the crowd, trailing through swarms of people that before had beguiled Zuko, but now serve as mere distractions from the broad back of the boy who'd saved his life not even a day before, the boy who doesn't know that underneath Zuko's ridiculous visors hides a scar, an insignia of royalty and violence and death.

Zuko knows he should stop and ask himself if what he's doing could endanger the entirety of his anonymity, but Sokka twists his head to see it he is still following him, once or twice, as though he's scared that Zee will bolt.

Zuko would, but the person he is right now has nothing to be afraid of. _You are nobody,_ he reminds himself. _And your Emperor is a sea away._

He waits for Zuko to catch up at the entrance of a khaki tent with a warm glow shining from the inside, leaning against a wooden post, his booted legs crossed at the ankles. "Only a few allowed in at a time," Sokka says. "This one tends to get a little crowded."

Something akin to curiosity ignites his eyes.

"I doubt you'll be able to see with those glasses on."

Zuko crosses his arms over his chest, ignoring the way the bag with the (probably already soggy) fried seafood crunches under them.

"Then perhaps I should wait outside." His voice is cold, but Sokka's persistency awakens a strange fear in Zuko. He cannot be discovered. Not by him. Not right now.

Sokka shrugs, but his eyes are devious under his lashes, and a smile is still playing with his lips. "I was merely curious. And your accent isn't helping, really."

"My _accent_?!" He'd been practicing his entire way to the market, attempting to draw out the vowels just like he'd heard Eska do. Just how good is his disguise? He eyes the crowd of people around them. Perhaps everyone's just humoring the Prince who thinks that his thick sunglasses and an old coat can cover the stench of power and bloodshed that trails behind him.

But Sokka— Sokka cannot be an actor this good. Sokka should have said something. He should have given himself away if he really knew who Zuko was.

Clearly aware of his sudden tenseness, Sokka gives a short, apologetic laugh, like bells being carried away by Morye's northern winds. He sounds like a boy who'd grown up around treachery and disguises. He sounds like he isn't going to prod any further. "You can relax. Many people pass through this town, and many want to keep their faces hidden. Dark times and all."

The last sentence is meant to be nonchalant, but there's something too raw about the tone of Sokka's voice as he speaks it.

"Thank you," Zuko says, because he doesn't know what else to say. He hadn't been brought up to kindness. He doesn't know how to tell Sokka that it's okay, that he's seen dark times too. That his nightmares are only nightmares.

That he's thankful for Sokka saving his life.

The tent's entrance flaps open, and through it drifts a concoction of scents Zuko faintly recognizes — peppercorns, cinnamon and star anise, fennel seeds and something else, sharp and sweet and enveloping. 

He leans in almost unconsciously. Beside him, Sokka scoffs. "But of course. In you go. It's our turn."

The warmth inside the tent is a stark contrast to the frosty chill of the morning outside. The dim interior is lit by an oil lamp on one of the tables, standing beside rows of containers full of powders of colors varying from a deep vermillion to the brightest yellow. Brushing past him — Zuko cannot help but tense as their shoulders touch — Sokka leans onto the biggest table, behind which sits a woman with the skin of her face so wrinkled that it appears to be permanently tattooed.

She smiles up at Sokka, and Zuko can only guess that he's smiling in return. "How sweet to see you so merry, Sokka. How has Konna been? Katara?"

Zuko hates that he tunes out, but the conversation appears quiet, like a flowing river, and soon the syllables in their speech become so foreign to his ears that he zones out completely, eyes drifting back to the culprits behind the aroma wafting through the spice tent.

The cinnamon in one of them is nothing like he'd ever seen; it's a delicate shade of tan, and he can already taste the mixture of sugar granules and the aromatic spice on his tongue as he bites into a cinnamon roll. This is his vice and his virtue — Zuko adores baking like nothing else.

Cursing at the scarf muffling the scents, he takes soft brown bags from one of the tables and begins filling them with anise seeds, cocoa powder and the cinnamon that just smells so _right_. He finds a dark salt that smells of sulfur, a small box of coconut sugar and other unrecognizable spices.

For the first time in months, Zuko feels peaceful; picking out spices somewhere next to a frozen sea and blue mountains, the boy who'd saved his life chatting away to a serene-looking owner of a spice tent.

He doesn't realize that Sokka's looking at him until he collects the bags he'd picked out in his hands, the fried food forgotten by the curcuma container, and walks over to where the old woman is sitting, a sly smile stretching her wrinkled lips.

"Good morning," he tells the woman, his voice coming out softer than he'd expected; he'd been so immersed into his own thoughts that he'd forgotten all about his surroundings. Zuko clears his throat. "I'd like to buy these."

The woman hums in response as Sokka leans over to peek into the bags. "Oh, the cinnamon's the real deal. Have you tried French toast yet? You have to try the one my grandma makes. I could tell it to you, if you'd like." His voice is only a shade teasing.

Zuko doesn't know why his cheeks feel so warm; the scarf and the change in temperature must have gotten to him, because, as Sokka leans even closer, oblivious to his state, he finds it difficult to exhale.

"Maybe someday," Zuko chokes out. _There is no someday,_ he thinks, suddenly and terribly.

There are too many thoughts swarming through his head, but alarm bells are beginning to ring in his mind, and he knows what he needs to do— get away.

The possibility of Sokka discovering who Zuko is is a far greater unknown evil than the safety he feels in a tent in the middle of a market. He realizes, all of a sudden, how stupid he'd been — how reckless.

How fragile Zee's persona really is, and, most of all, how much he doesn't want for Sokka to realize who is hiding behind the visors and the scarf.

Maybe he already knows.

It's the sudden, overwhelming desire to run that pushes Zuko to place a hurried twenty notes onto the table — he knows it is more than enough, — thanking the woman swiftly under his breath, and bolt for the exit, nearly spilling the bags he'd collected into his arms on the way out.

Behind him, Sokka utters a confused " _where are you going?_ ", but Zuko's pushing back the fabric and emerging into the faint light of the morning, his eyes picking out the instantly alert guards.

Zuko thought it'd be easier to breathe outside, but it isn't. _Please don't come after me_ , he thinks as he walks a beat too swiftly to seem natural, realizing that he's running away. 

Where has this sudden feeling come from? 

His guards join him as he passes the stalls, unseeing, his hunger and his moods forgotten, the road to his hotel looming grey ahead.

Back in the safety of his own suite, Zuko unwraps the layers of his disguise with fingers numbed by the cold.

He'd had a lot of time, on his way to his rooms, to ponder over his encounter at the market. To remember Sokka and the ease with which he seemed to protect Zuko from a gun aimed at his chest with his own body.

His motives were unknown to Zuko then, and they are still unfathomable now, but a clarity seeps through the fog of his racing thoughts, and he realizes, with a stillness, that Sokka did not have to do what he had done.

Zuko would not think twice if one of his nameless guards took a bullet for him. He would not care if a trickster merchant was punished for attempting to deceive the Prince.

There's something incomprehensible about Sokka knocking him over in the face of an assassination attempt and scolding Yakone for trying to sell Zuko a bunch of overpriced lemons. It's not a feeling Zuko can pin in place, but it leaves him with goosebumps all over and with the marbled intensity of Sokka's eyes gazing at him from every corner of his blue bedroom.

He knows what he needs to do for people like Sokka, people who don't realize the meaning behind their seemingly mindless actions.

A plan begins emerging in his mind, and it is heady and all things illogical and gallant, but Zuko cares little for common sense as he calls for his guards and orders them to go down to the city itself — he'd had enough of it for today — and buy the necessary equipment and ingredients.

Zuko knows only one way of showing his gratitude, something he'd been taught by the warmth of his mother's hands as she guided his own chubby arms over bowls full of butter vanilla, by the aroma of a browning crust in the oven, by chocolate chips on his lips as he would bite into a cookie.

His minds drifts back to the pouch of cinnamon, lying where he'd thrown it onto the bed with the rest of the brown bags. It drifts further, to the downturn of Sokka’s lips as he reminds them both that they live in a time darker than any night. 

  
He rolls the sleeves of his silky shirt and pulls his hair into a topknot, pinning it with the royal insignia, full of anticipation before hours of mindless foolishness. 

The Prince is going to bake cinnamon rolls for the boy who'd saved his life.


	6. a murderer, no matter how beloved

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> His scar is hidden by the shadows, and he looks like one of the few boys Sokka had pinned and let pin himself against the stone walls of the town's darkening streets in the past.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: violence, a little blood, mentions of death, the usual.

**CHAPTER VI**

SOKKA

He's still thinking about Zemlya's delegate's words as he cracks open the window and lets a gust of an impending blizzard cool off his skin. His bedroom, so warm whenever Katara or his grandmother enter it, now has a chilly, otherworldly gleam; and, despite checking the room inch for inch, Sokka feels — _knows_ — that each one of his movements is being tracked and noted, searched for treason.

He'd just recently returned from a radio conversation in one of the hastily dug out tunnels underneath the Jasmine Dragon. There, he sat, Katara and Aang by his sides, listening to the weekly reports bristling his ears from the metallic box as it hummed with voices of another nation. 

Carefully worded, their speeches still boiled down to one thing — that the two months before the Emperor's arrival to Morye, before the ostensible usurpation of Ozai's throne by a group lead by a fifteen-year old boy, are simply not _enough_.

There are no news of any allies within Ogni's walls. There are no news of any developments within their planning.

There are no news, yet the Altair is everywhere.

In his father's eyes as he shakes him awake. In his grandmother's slightly trembling fingers as she slides a notepad over to a fifteen-year-old Sokka, with the truth, and he thinks, _finally_. As he reads the words and realizes that his father was not, in fact, wrongly accused. That his father was, in fact, a traitor of the State, a renegade. That his father is probably already dead.

He knows too much to stay sane in a world so bleak, but Sokka has no choice; he had scattered gunpowder all over the place and now holds the spark necessary for the explosion in his hands.

His own fingers hold no tremor as he slides a cigarette pack off of his bedside table with deliberate slowness, and, facing the window once more, places it between his lips. 

The sparks from his lighter take a few tries to come alive.

He had wanted to feel a calm, and the smoke in his lungs finally grants his wish.

Sokka leans out of the window, oblivious — or pretending to be until the numbness settles — to the whirring snow. Taking a drag, like a scavenger ever so thirstful finally able to drink, he inhales, long and deep. His thoughts travel back to this morning, to the faint grey sunlight and to the defectively disguised man he'd met at the market.

 _Zee_. Sokka scoffs. He'd have to be an idiot to believe that.

There is too much to think about, so instead, he thinks about Suki. He imagines her hands sliding up his arms and snaking over his shoulders, an embrace.

Startlingly, her fingers turn long and cold, a grip rather than a caress, and the Prince's eyes, like beads of jade, gaze up at him through the darkest stage of twilight.

_Not this again_. Exasperated, Sokka goes to open his eyes, realizing belatedly that they have never been closed, instead staring down at the snowed-over pavement, lit warm yet dim by the scarcely remaining lampposts.

What, at least, should be a snowed over pavement.

Beneath him, shrouded into dusk like one of his hallucinations, stands the Prince.

Blinking a few times, Sokka gazes down at his slender figure, the blizzard clinging to his obsidian coat. Just a few meters away, he makes out the sleek silhouette of a car nobody in his neighborhood can afford, catches a glimpse of a face in the driver's seat, no doubt a guard, and his brain, after a short-circuit, stammers back into action. 

Not quickly enough — his fingers, having forgotten to flex, let the cigarette go, and it floats down, landing right beneath Zuko's polished boots.

_Zuko's boots_. Because it is _Prince Zuko_ standing next to the entrance of his apartment building, hooded head thrown back and eyes looking right up at Sokka, it's the Prince bringing his princely foot down onto the still glowing cigarette, crushing it. The unwavering gold of his stare stays on Sokka's frozen figure as he does so.

_I_ _want to please you_ , he says in his dreams, but this— this looks more like the beginning of a nightmare.

He's pretty sure, by this point, that the Prince is here to have Sokka thrown into a cell for — _fuck_ , — for _so_ many federal crimes. 

_How did you find me? Why are you here? Why have you—_

Slamming the window closed, fingers now _definitely_ shaking, Sokka bolts out of his room and past the closed door of Katara's bedroom, past the kitchen where his grandmother is humming under her breath and she kneads, unlatching the numerous bolts on his apartment door, not caring for a coat but grabbing a knife he keeps in one of the miniature malachite boxes by the entrance, shutting the door and half-tumbling down the stairs leading to the snowy exit. He stuffs the knife deep into one of his boots.

_What do you want?_

There are only a few words in his mind as he performs his hastily panicked actions — _Zuko is here_. A descendant of royalty is standing in front of his apartment. Zuko, someone who probably has no time for eating, let alone doing something like _this_ , has found an hour in the night and the utter _nerve_ to appear in Sokka's world, and for _what_? What could he possibly have found out in the mere day and a half he'd spent in this town?

_How much do you know?_

The last landing dishevels Sokka as he trips, but he cares little for the strands escaping his ponytail as he hisses a curse through clenched teeth and finally heads to the entrance, an intense feeling of déjà vu climbing up his throat. But his weapon is not a khanjali, and it is not Suki sitting at his table, finishing the last of his cupcakes.

The light of the lamps does little to help the darkness that overhauls him as he steps outside, the wind tugging at his hair, at the rings pierced on the sides of his ears, seeping through his thin long-sleeve as he turns around to face Zuko.

The questions that had burned his tongue moments ago now seem to be stuck somewhere in his windpipe.

He had known from the very beginning that Zuko is a weapon, a diplomatic machine intricately designed by The Emperor to hide the ruthlessness swarming under the skin of the son and the father.

But standing in front of him, _he_ — just another one of Altair's indoctrinated tools cannot bathe in the afterglow of the streetlights like this, cannot look this apprehensive and terrified all at once, waiting for either of them to say something.

His scar is hidden by the shadows, and he looks like one of the few boys Sokka had pinned and let pin himself against the stone walls of the town's darkening streets in the past.

He should really stop thinking about this.

He clears his throat. How should he even address him? Your Highness? Fuck. He's too unprepared to find royalty in the middle of his apartment block.

"Prince Zuko," he finally says, and his voice is all breath.

The Prince inclines his head and takes a step closer to stand within hearing range. There's something clutched in one of his hands as he lets them fall to his sides, a cream colored tote bag that flutters in the wind.

He looks just as startled as Sokka feels that he'd spoken.

Zuko blinks several times — Sokka is still sure that this is part of a nicotine-catalyzed hallucination.

"Good evening," he finally says, and his voice is too real to be a dream. "You must be — you must be wondering why I'm here."

The wind is picking up speed, and half of his words are drowned out. Sokka motions with his head towards the entrance of the building he'd just stumbled out of — an invitation into a warmer place, where he doesn't feel as though he's about to freeze and regretting having taken a fucking _knife_ instead of a coat. 

"I have to stay within the guards' seeing range," Zuko says over the wind, and takes another step closer. There's barely a meter separating them now, and Sokka can see the way his eyebrow climbs towards his nose bridge in a frown. His cheeks are a feverish pink from the cold, and Sokka can only imagine the state of his own face and hair.

"How did you find me?" He finally asks, the words slipping easily off of his tongue, voice slightly raised. Zuko doesn't appear as though he means harm — nevertheless, this is Sokka's second time seeing the Prince, and perhaps he's been trained to sweet-talk traitors into giving themselves in to his father.

The gusts of wind have gotten weaker, and Sokka can finally catch his breath, the heat returning momentarily to his body. A strange stillness hangs in the air between them, as neither take a step back.

"I asked around," Zuko says, and there's something familiar about the cagey cadence of his tone. Dream-Zuko and real-Zuko have an eerily similar voice.

Sokka's smile is rueful. "Around?"

"I—" Zuko begins, but cuts himself off with a clicking of his tongue. "This information really isn't relevant."

"Okay." This is definitely a dream. When had Sokka gotten to the point where he can't discern fantasy from reality? _Why is the fucking Prince speaking to him?_ "So you are here for me — though I can't imagine why. Usually it's the patrolmen."

"Usually—?" Once again, the prince halts. "Whatever. I came here to thank you for saving my life," he finally rushes out.

Sokka half expects him to begin kneeling and begging him to be allowed to please. There is the same mutinous gleam in his eyes, a greed that is ever present, crystallized in amber. This is a dream, and he's going to wake up, and Prince Zuko isn't thanking him for having tackled him to the ground whilst Suki was out on a rooftop having an existential assassin crisis.

"So thank you," Zuko says, his voice eager, "because you didn't have to do what you did. You didn't have to try to protect me— I mean, I have guards, and you— you still risked your life. For _me_. For someone you have _never_ seen before, and I don't understand why—"

Sokka scoffs, his arms snaking over his chest.

_Oh_.

So _this_ is why the prince came all the way here in the middle of the darkening night; to thank one of his future loyal puppets, in person, for being ready to take a bullet for his highness. He recollects the way one of Zuko's guards looked at him, as though he was no more than something to shield their prince with in case a rifle was ever pointed at him again.

He doesn't know why there is a sudden bitterness in his mouth, but it makes Sokka confused and borderline irate — that the Prince thinks that _he_ deserves saving.

Just how inflated must his ego be to think that everyone in the world is worth a tenth of the person standing before Sokka? How can he possibly imagine that one of them deserves to die for the other?

_A true diplomat_. He didn't even ask for his name. Sokka no longer expects him to kneel. Instead, he thinks, it is Zuko who is expecting something of the sorts, so that he can pat his head and grace him with a few rehearsed phrases.

He remembers what it took him turn away from Mai, to run. He remembers being throw off of Zuko like an annoying pest. He remembers Suki's hollowed gaze as she explained why she needed to shoot him right in the heart, and his blood begins to boil. For the prince to think that— that Sokka would _ever_ think that he himself is nothing but a cover, a buckler for royalty—

His thoughts are no longer his own, but his bitterness is.

"Risked _my_ life. For _you_."

The eagerness leaves Zuko's face, but his eyes are questioning.

"Have I said something wrong?"

"That whole monologue was wrong," Sokka says sharply, words jagged. "The life at risk wasn't yours."

He can see, now that the snow has stopped rushing into his eyes, that the severity of his sentence startles Zuko, but he can't stop himself, not when he wants— no, needs— for the prince to feel the venom poisoning his words.

He yearns for Zuko to realize that he means nothing, just like Sokka.

"I don't understand," Zuko says, eyes a piercing shade of flame as they settle on Sokka. It's disconcerting, being watched with such intent. There's something in his eyes, as though he had wanted to hear something completely different.

Sokka shakes his head, partly to clear his thoughts. "But of course. And I hate to be the one to explain this to you, but if you were to be shot, Your Highness, the people suffering wouldn't be your nation. I mean, sure—" he pauses, and Zuko's eyes harden, "they'd undoubtedly mourn the loss of an heir to their bloody throne. And your father would probably be _very_ angry." His next words are a tentative staccato. "You know how he gets when he's angry. He burns nations down to the ground.

And the people to pay for your death would be us."

_What the fuck am I doing_? He tries, but his thoughts are already forgotten. There's only Zuko, entitled to his life, and Sokka, there to give his own over.

Zuko seems robbed of speech, but his hands are fists at his sides, and Sokka finds it difficult to stop once he'd started. The thrill of making royalty suffer, even mildly, is a sadistic pleasure he cannot skip; his father chimes in, and Aang's parents, and Suki, _he razed my town to the ground,_ and he wants to open Zuko's eyes to the real fucking world that is nothing like his palaces.

"You can't possibly think that _nobody_ here wants you dead. Because of people like you, our close and loved ones are locked up, or shot, or taken away and _never fucking seen again._ But we know better. We know better than to shoot you when there's no alibi for a fucking country, when you're _replaceable_. Your life means nothing. _Nothing_." Zuko flinches violently away, as though he'd been fearing and waiting for someone to tell him this. "But _we'd_ pay for you death, not Ogni or the murderer on your fucking throne. I'd rather die by the hand of my own people than let you destroy us because you think you fucking matter more."

He's breathing hard, and he can feel, in the frigid air, how the snowflakes on his neck are melting. He can barely see Zuko; the world is spinning around Sokka — he'd just said _all of this_ to a royal representative, and he could still say more. He could go all fucking night.

Exhilaration alone would drive him to his grave.

There is nothing left to him, no regret for his words, only adrenaline. Sokka doesn't remember taking another step, but he can feel the heat radiating off of Zuko, the tense set to his shoulders as he stands there and takes it. _He shouldn't stand there and take it,_ Sokka thinks. _He should fight back._

Sokka wants him to, desperately. He needs a good fight to take his mind off of so many things, and the Prince is as good of an opponent as any.

He's already on the verge of being delirious.

"I can have you executed for your words." Zuko's eyes are slits now, and his scar adds a chilling violent gleam to his expression, but his voice is stiller than death. Sokka doesn't understand whether he's furious or mildly irritated, if he'd heard all of this before.

He can't help himself; he laughs. It's strange, and sounds more like hyperventilation. The entire scene seems surreal. Zuko has come here to thank him only to have Sokka hiss profanities and thinly veiled threats at his face.

"This is how you thank someone for saving your life?"

There's no warmth left in Zuko's voice as he responds. _Has there been warmth before?_ "You've made it clear that you were saving the lives of your loved ones. Dark times and all," he adds, a non-sequitur, and Sokka thinks, _I've already heard this somewhere today, but where?_

No time to think about that. "Does that disappoint you? That I won't put my life on the line for you just because you've got a title?"

Standing this close to Zuko, with the air strangely still around them, as though before a storm, Sokka picks up on the faint scent of cinnamon. It throws him off track momentarily, as it's something he'd never expect to cling to a prince. Expensive cologne, maybe, but not this abrupt warmth.

It doesn't belong on someone like him.

"You're kept in warmth and blood and glory," Sokka continues, and Zuko still says nothing. _Why isn't he saying anything? "_ While the people who have more honor in them than you will ever see in your _fucking_ palaces die in prison cells."

There is nothing else to add, now that Sokka has said it all. He's shivering all over, but it's no longer from the cold, and the prince is looking somewhere past him, into the stillness of the night. 

"Whatever they have done to land themselves in prison," Zuko says finally, and his tone is dripping with arrogance that he can't conceal— with vindication, Sokka realizes that he's not immune to his words, "they probably deserved it. They deserve to rot there."

For a moment, he sees white. He sees his father's arms as they place breakfasts in front of him, as he teaches him how to skate on a frozen lake.

Then, he sees nothing— he only feels— and within seconds, his arms are wrapped around Zuko's bare throat, and he hauls him into the nearest stone wall with such force that he hear a satisfying crack as he back of his princely head connects with the wall, a sound not even his hood can muffle.

From up close, he can feel the abrupt end of Zuko's quick, hot breaths on one of his cheeks, can see the stars dancing in his widely open eyes. He's gone deadly still under Sokka's grip, fighting hard to maintain his consciousness, the only thing betraying him being the rapid pulse underneath his feverish skin.

The scene is familiar, and Sokka knows he doesn't have much time left — already there's a rushed crunching of boots behind him, royalty's loyal dogs come to tear him to shreds for letting a hair fall from the prince's head.

" _Fuck you and your fucking Emperor,"_ Sokka hisses right into his face, as Zuko's pink mouth parts slightly in at attempt to inhale the air he knows won't come, "You're just like your fucking father. Don't think for _one_ _fucking_ second that any thank yous can ever wash away the stench of my peoples blood—"

Someone grabs him from behind, and Sokka's ready. He unclasps his hands form around Zuko's throat in favor of bracing himself when he finally hits the concrete pavement. The lampposts blur together into one as his head connects with the floor, and he sees, through a haze, that Zuko is still glued to the wall, as though afraid to move.

He is kicked in the stomach, hard and abrupt, and he gasps, knees drawing up instinctively to protect himself. He's no stranger to the infliction of violence, but he's too vulnerable tonight, stretched too thin. For a few moments, he's unable to do anything but dry heave and think that perhaps he's gone a little overboard with pinning Zuko against the wall.

When Sokka opens his eyes again, he's certain that he's already unconscious, because Zuko is leaning over him exactly as he had done in his dream a few nights ago. His hood had fallen back, and his long hair is disheveled around him like strands of midnight, and nothing can take away from his terrifying scar and his terrifying eyes.

Sokka sucks in a painful breath. He can see with a painful clarity that Zuko's nose has started bleeding, and a rivulet, like a bead of ruby, runs down to his lips. The latter wipes his long fingers across his face, and rubs the blood in between them, disbelief and nausea his only two interchanging expressions.

Zuko's eyes settle on him, and he looks every inch a despot and a painting all at once.

Slowly, his bloodied fingers land on Sokka's paralyzed cheek. The realization that he's smearing his blood on Sokka's face in a precise streak is a heady and sick one.

The prince says, the snow falling slow and solemn behind him, "I _am_ like my father, Sokka. And don't you forget that."

Later, when the prince is long gone and Sokka can finally feel like he's ready to get up, prodding his ribs for any substancial damage, he realizes with a sickening start that he has never given Zuko his name.


	7. the snap of a branch, the step of a hunter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's then that Sokka hears the abrupt snap of a frozen branch, the sound prominent enough only because he'd done it countless of times whilst trying to tread soundlessly through the woods, and he's almost sure that it's an animal when a sudden whispered "fuck" carries through the clearing.

**CHAPTER VII**

**SOKKA**

There's a dull pain in the area of his abdomen.

He tries to stretch it out, he tries to dull it down, but to no avail — like Zuko's eyes gazing at him in wonder and ferocity, the ache from the kick is a part of him now, if only just for the night. He doesn't even need to slip out of his long-sleeve to know that a misshapen bruise is forming across his stomach. 

The climb back up to his apartment was excruciatingly punishing in many ways — alongside the humiliation that came from being kicked by a royal guard, The Prince had told him that his father deserved to—

Sokka curls into a fetal position and refuses to move. It'd been a blessing that neither Katara nor his grandmother wondered where he'd ran off to so suddenly — Sokka has done that often, and the reasons had always stayed to them somewhat unexciting, so they never asked.

He'd fallen onto the sheets of his bed as soon as he'd taken off his boots and shoved the knife back into the malachite box, locking the door and pressing his forehead against it for a few seconds, a deep, ragged exhale escaping his lips as he did so, his fingers trembling on the fastened locks.

The entire situation seems to him a hallucination, now that he's thinking about it. Everything, from the soft lines of Zuko's half-smile underneath the lamplights to the way he smeared his blood across Sokka's cheek, ignites a fever in him, something akin to a raging fire, deadlier and colder still. Zuko looked every inch a fantasy as he stood there in the gathering storm, his words as cold as midwinter.

And Sokka — what was he thinking, saying all that shit? What the fuck has gotten into him? The words he'd spat are already fading in his memory, but the message they'd delivered was clear enough. He could've just said that he's part of Nox and Zuko wouldn't be surprised. It was astonishing, however, that Sokka wasn't detained right on the spot and executed —there was vindication in Sokka shoving the Prince against a wall and telling him to essentially go fuck himself, but the price he had to pay was not worthy.

There's a faint knocking on Sokka's door as he sighs, a shaky exhale, and he picks out the manner of Katara's footsteps, light and cautious. "Are you asleep?"

"No," he says into the pillow, attempting to school his expression into something that doesn't scream _"I might have just punched royalty in the face and thrown the entire revolution under the bus, I'm sorry?"._

He feels the mattress bend under her weight slightly as Katara sits. The pressure of her gaze on his back makes it unbeatable to breathe into the pillow, so he twists around, biting back a sudden hiss of pain that threatens to escape as the muscles near his injury flex. Katara's eyes are too inquisitive for her own good as they search his face. In an instant, they widen—

"Sokka, your face—"

Sokka's hands swat away her fingers in a panicked instant — _fuck_ , Zuko's blood is still smeared across his cheek like some fucking warpaint; he'd been in too much pain to even think about occupying the bathroom to do something as trivial as washing his face. Alarmed, he attempts to make out a semblance of a believable lie, but nothing comes to mind. _I fell over in the snow? I cut myself on a knife?_

Katara looks like she wants to say something, too, something more than just a mild chastise.

"I hate this," she whispers instead, harsh and ragged and so unlike her that Sokka's fingers curl around her wrist. Then, in a softer voice,— "Are you and Suki fighting again?" Before Sokka can reply, she draws her eyes away from his face, "I saw her today, before you came. She was... helping... in the Dragon. She seemed— well, upset. More than usual."

It seems like the evening when Suki had once again proven Sokka's firm belief in The Emperor's savagery was years ago. 

So much has happened since then. His thoughts skim over the days like stages in his life. The Prince's arrival. Suki. The rifle. The market.

The Prince.

Like a rivulet of red, Zuko is the thread weaving through the unfortunate events of Sokka's week.

He bites his cheek again.

_"Promise me you won't tell the others?" Suki asks abruptly that one evening not even a week ago, after he'd burned the note she'd written and they'd cleaned up the mess she had made of the kitchen._

_Sokka halts, and then, in a second, he's leaning so close to her ear that he can smell the peachy notes of her shampoo. "Suki, you're asking me to make up a lie plausible enough that the rest of us will believe I just happened to nosedive into The Prince's fucking chest? While I was literally supposed to stay in the shadows?"_

_She has the semblance of decency necessary to lower her head in a penitent gesture. "None of us were three except for me and Mai. And I'm pretty sure that any videos will be erased by the Altair even if they do reach the web. It's not like any of— of us— have a phone, anyway." She sighs. "I just want to tell them myself. They won't understand if it's like this."_

_Suki's gaze on him is discomfortingly, wholly unguarded, and there is no trace of that serenity she'd always possessed. Sokka wonders briefly if she's been wearing a mask for Nox's sake the entire time._

_He wonders if she has been wearing a mask every time they're together._

_He had my town razed to the ground._

_Sokka gives in._

_"Fine." There's a pause as the scent of burnt paper floats through the kitchen, the scent of things Suki probably never wanted to tell him. "But don't—" he almost places a hand over his aching head. Instead, he closes his eyes, avoiding Suki's wounded expression. "I can't see you right now. I can't... trust you right now."_

And Suki leaves, and Sokka is alone again, wondering whether the traces of pleasure he has in his life are only relief and the heartache is what is constant.

How can things ever be okay between him and— and anyone, when he'd seen so much, when all of them had seen the world at its worst, — how can they think that the light in the darkness is not just a game of the shadows?

"Yeah, we fought." He says instead, his eyes averted towards the bare wall of his bedroom. "I think we're on a break."

Katara sighs again, averting her gaze in the same direction. "Sokka. I understand. But— well." She falters, fingers clenched around his blanket, "You know we can't have petty arguments eclipsing what really matters right now, right?"

Sokka thinks back to Suki's unwavering belief in the fact that the blood of one boy with a golden hairpiece can take vengeance for a massacre. He thinks back to Zuko, so real and warm under his fingers. He wonders what it would be like to witness him collapsing onto his knees, blood dripping down his face from a clear wound.

He wonders how Suki can sleep at night, having seen so much death.

"Yeah." His voice sounds distant even to his own ears, a foreign sound.

He's far away. He's with his father, skating over a frozen lake. His mittens have a hole in them where his thumbs are. His father holds him by his elbows as they glide over the ice. Glide, glide, glide. _Dad, dad, dad._ "I understand."

ZUKO

In his dreams this night, _the wall behind him is cold, but Sokka's body pinning him against it is colder. Everything about him is blue — the streaks of paint on his face, his earring, his eyes._

_"Prince Zuko," he whispers, a smile in his words, but the blue in his eyes switches like a kaleidoscope to the colour that belongs to the Crown. There's blood dripping from his nose, and his fingers are around Zuko's neck, a welcome pressure against his racing pulse._

_His lids are low and he stares up through thick lashes, up at Zuko, up at The Prince._

_Sokka leans in._

Zuko jolts awake in a bedroom that is not his own, the illusion of Sokka's breath on his mouth. Running his hands over his face, he is desperate and reluctant at once to expunge the dream out of his memory.

SOKKA

Sokka wakes up to the scent of cinnamon wafting through the entire apartment.

Several things enter his mind at once — the memory of yesterday, the cinnamon he'd bought with a stranger wearing glasses too big for his fair face, and Zuko leaning over him, not a dream, but a waking nightmare, and the scent of cinnamon rising from the bag the Prince threw to the side before peeling himself off of the wall.

Why would Zuko bring a random bag to a meeting with Sokka? Why did that bag smell like the good cinnamon? Why does his bruise hurt so fucking much?

Sokka groans. It must be well late into the morning, — Saturdays are the only days Katara allows herself, and consequently Sokka, to sleep in, but he cannot force his muscles to move and slither out of bed.

He could fake being sick and spend the day in bed — he certainly feels it. But in that case Katara will spend her weekend glued to his bed like a leech, checking his temperature, forcing chicken soup down his throat, and Gran Gran will make him one of her _special_ teas. He gags, the memory of it still far too vivid on his tongue. _Yeah, no._

Half an hour later, showered, no more royal blood on his face, and donning one of his father's sweaters, Sokka steps into the kitchen, water droplets falling from the strands of his hair and onto the recently cleaned floor. Gran Gran's bent over the pan, and it smells heavenly and warm, and Katara's setting the table, still in her pajamas.

He admires the scene for a moment, heart clenching with an inexplicable bittersweet emotion.

"Morning," he says. His grandmother smiles at him from the stove, motioning with a wooden spatula towards the pan.

"You've come just in time, Sokka. Would you like some French toast?" She winks. "I used your favorite cinnamon."

And Sokka says yes, and they have breakfast together, and his grandmother keeps smiling at him, her eyes and the crow's feet around them ever-present, and Sokka thinks that, maybe he hadn't messed up that badly. Maybe Zuko will forget about him and go back to his princely activities. Maybe they will have French toast next Saturday, too, and the Saturday after that, and maybe they will succeed, and there will be no more patrols and curfews and blood and death and prisons and Nox, because the world will no longer need a revolution.

Maybe everything will turn out to be okay.

"I think it's time for us to take a hike," Katara says, once the dishes have been washed and dried, and Sokka's on her bed in her bedroom, and her fingers are braiding his hair.

A hike, for the two— three of them, including Aang, is a long-held tradition, upheld by his father before his was taken, and resumed by Sokka a few years later. There is a cabin by the foot of one of the mountains surrounding Morye, one of the many abandoned by residents no longer able to juggle curfews and work under a new regime, and it's perfect for getaway activities they'd all enjoyed as kids. Sokka's fingers itch to make maple taffies — Katara would warm maple syrup in a saucepan over the stove, Sokka'd pour it over the clear white snow of the woods, and Aang would prance around them in an exhilarated frenzy, like the insane sweet-toothed kid he is at heart.

But the best thing about the cabin is that nobody knows of its existence apart from a few members of Nox. It doesn't have the menace of being bugged, and Aang can be called by his true name, not _Axel_ or _Lee_.

They hadn't done it since the first snow fell in the beginning of November, with revolution meetings taking up most of Sokka's time, and exam season meaning nights spent grading practice tests for Katara.

Sokka props himself onto his elbows, shaking off Katara's nimble fingers. "These better not be box braids. And yeah, I think Lee needs some fresh air."

Katara's eyes soften. "As do you."

He is getting the faint impression that Katara wants to drag him out somewhere where she can tweeze out the details of what is truly bothering Sokka without the fear of being overheard, yet he opts for saying nothing.

"I'll start packing our things, then." She leans closer to his ear, voice barely a breath; she'd gotten far too good at whispering. "I thought we could stay overnight, so pack pajamas for both you and him, alright?"

Sokka gives her a lopsided grin. "Don't forget the maple syrup like you did last time, or you'll be the one going all the way back for it."

Katara chucks a pillow at his face.

An hour later, with Aang having been picked up from his recent accommodation — a small windowless room deep under the Jasmine Dragon, made bearable by Katara's efforts and Sokka's favorite posters — the three of them are knee-deep into freshly fallen snow, the scent of pine and freedom around them, and nothing hit an eerily calm silence surrounding the midday woods. The sky is as grey as ash overhead, and the layers upon layers of pine trees crowd around the trio like a protective wall.

Sokka lives for moments like these.

"No," Katara is saying lowly somewhere behind him, careful not to disturb a strange November bliss at the foothills of the mountain ridge, "snow leopards were extinct years ago, Aang. They're not going to leap out at us— AH!"

Hand wrapping around the hilt of a knife, Sokka whips around, only to cackle erratically at the scene before him: Aang and Katara are huddled together like a pair of terrified sheep as a rabbit leaps between the trees and the clearing. 

"Stop laughing!!" Katara hisses, detangling herself from a vividly blushing Aang. "And you, let go of my coat." Sokka has stopped laughing already — it hurts still to flex the muscles of his abdomen.

Ever since his fifteenth birthday, Aang has grown taller, his cheeks having lost the last of their childish plump, and bouts of solemnity becoming more and more common for him, but his eyes as he glances at Katara before joining Sokka dance with the same gleam they had several years ago.

Sokka remembers little of the details of Aang's arrival. It seems as though he has been part of their family their entire life. The cause of his joining them, however, Sokka will never forget.

His father had told him the story only once, a tale of bloodshed and slaughter, execution and ruthlessness.

Twelve years ago, there were four nations.

A harmonious force, his father would say, they were governed by a supreme council, with their leaders sat on four gilded thrones. The Council worked singularly unanimously, and whenever conflict arose, they were quick to discuss and rectify it, leaving no chance to brutality and viciousness.

Everything changed when The Altair decided that they were a nation far too formidable to bow down to three weaker states. When they decided that they were descendants from the Sun itself.

It was easy, then, for Ozai to align an army vicious enough to feed off of conquer, and when Vozduh, a nation know not only for its peaceful regime but precious metals, refused to hand over the resources necessary to build weapons and machines, it was wiped out, mercilessly and quickly.

Overnight, Vozduh became nothing more but a desert full of corpses — Ozai left nobody behind. The royal family was executed in their own chambers.

The Council was dismantled. The Altair stepped in in its heed. The weapons were built, and Morye and Zemlya were no longer free, and the world bowed its head low and defeated to Ogni.

Sokka looks over at Aang, the tattoos of his nation hidden by a fur hood, and imagines The Emperor and The Prince trailing through a river of blood. He imagines, wishful, the look on Ozai's face once he finally sees Aang, twelve years after he had held the cooling body of a three-year-old claimed Vozduh prince in his arms, and Sokka thinks,

_they will pay._

For the first day in the cabin, nothing is wrong.

They light the stove — it is too much of a risk to light the fireplace, despite Aang's desperate wails, — and make not chocolate with whipped cream that paints a white mustache over their upper lips. They wrap themselves up in blankets and recite tales as old as time. They sleep huddled together on the flood, pillows built around them in a fort, the wind howling low and deep outside, when it's late into the night, whispering plans of the revolution into each other's ears, three children too young to have bathed in the terrors of the new world. 

And for the first time in a while, Sokka dreams of nothing.

The morning is crisp and sunless as they wake up and begin preparing breakfast. The day moves lazily, Aang sleeping well into midday, and Katara drowning in a patched up couch with the fattest book Sokka has ever seen in his life. Sokka even hunts — to no avail, — partly because there are only a few animals left in the mountains, and partly because he prefers to leave killing for sport to The Altair. He picks winter berries near the wooden walls of the cabin, trekking down to a freezing stream to wash the juice off of his fingers and face.

On his second evening in the woods, Sokka finally gives in to restlessness.

"They need me."

Katara slaps the book down — Sokka can see that she's almost finished it — and gives him a hard look. "How about no." Before he can open his mouth in protest, she goes on, "Sokka, you've been far too engrossed into this revolution. Nox isn't just you and me. They'll be fine without you. Then, in the morning, you'll have your shift and see for yourself that Cyn hadn't gotten arrested, and Mai isn't missing, and that there are still no news on Ogni."

From the kitchen, Aang hums in agreement. Sokka worries his lip between his teeth, eyebrows furrowed. "I _know_ you're right. But it's so— it's _soon_. And I— there's no second chances. Not with this. We need this to be perfect. We need the time of his speech. We need the number of guards with him. And we need an Ogni delegate, even if it's just one. I _don't_ _know_ what's going on there, don't you understand? I _can't_ know. And it _kills_ me."

"Sokka—"

"I need some air." He walks over to the coat hangers, fishing a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from the pocket of his parka, and heads for a wooden balcony blocked from the inside by a tattered glass door.

The night greets him with a stillness only known to the woods and fog on his lips. Lifting his head up to the sky, Sokka places a cigarette between his teeth, thoughts racing.

He manages to light the cigarette on the third try when he hears the creak of the door behind him.

"There you are." Aang's voice is careful, as though coaxing a wounded animal. Sokka scoffs around his cigarette, tossing it over the railing and into the snow, knowing far too well how much Aang disapproves of his detrimental habits.

"You can tell Katara that I've calmed down."

"Nobody sent me here." Aang joins him, pointy elbows leaning over the balcony. The sleeves of Sokka's sweater are rolled up several times to free his hands. They stand still for a few moments, the pines a curtain of emerald shadows before them, the snow gleaming blue.

"What is meant to be—" Aang begins, but Sokka cuts him off.

"Do you remember your parents?"

Aang freezes for a moment, but Sokka's curiosity is a cat that escapes the bag of his courtesy with far too much ease.

There is nothing but the wind in Sokka's ears, until, finally, Aang opens his mouth.

"Yes and no. Hakoda—" the prince of Vozduh glances at him briefly before returning his gaze to the pine trees—"he told me a lot about them, since they were friends. My mum was rarely present in the real world, that's what he'd say. And my dad, he was an airhead, too. At least I don't need to wonder if I'm a legitimate heir." Aang huffs out a laugh. "But about life, about what it was like in there— I was three. I'm not supposed to remember everything. And with the— with the destruction—" his voice cracks, and Sokka draws his arm around Aang's bony shoulders, an attempt at comfort he knows will bring no solace, "I don't think I ever want to remember what it was like."

Silence lapses over them once more.

"Do you think it can ever be rebuilt?"

The question takes Sokka by surprise. "Vozduh?"

Aang nods, and Sokka rubs his shoulders.

"I don't doubt it. Once I get to Ozai, it's over. And you're the prince. It's what you do. Build your kingdom, even if it means starting over."

The hope in Aang's eyes is almost too much for Sokka. "Alright, you better go now, 'cause I really need a smoke." Seeing the defiant set to the boy's mouth, Sokka growls, " _None_ of that. I'm an adult. Shoo."

He's alone again, and he lights another cigarette, and the night is silent and moonless around him.

It's then that Sokka hears the abrupt snap of a frozen branch, the sound prominent enough only because he'd done it countless of times whilst trying to tread soundlessly through the woods, and he's almost sure that it's an animal when a sudden whispered " _fuck_ " carries through the clearing.

He's frozen in place, eyes strained on the woods, even if there's nothing to see. There are no more sounds, no more cussing and no more branches snapping, and Sokka knows that whatever or whoever it was, they're already gone.

The cigarette smoke turns to acid in his lungs as he realizes, belatedly, that someone had been hiding in the woods for a long time, and that someone had listened closely to everything he'd had to say.

Standing there, in a cabin in the middle of the woods, Sokka is lost, ultimately and undoubtedly.


	8. the second prince

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> But that's— impossible. The prince was murdered. Nobody had been left alive. Zuko can't count how many times his father had retold him the tale of his conquests, his weapon of choice to slit the royal family’s throats in their chambers. His father is a conqueror, and conquerors spare no survivors, not even children.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I solemnly swear that the next chapter will finally have more interaction between our sugar plums!   
> Anyways, I hope you guys are all safe and loved, and I want to thank you for taking your time to enjoy my work, — there is nothing in this world I love more than creating, building, making people feel. You deserve the world and I hope you know that. Love you <3

  
**CHAPTER VIII**

**ZUKO**

After his dream, Zuko is unsure of whether the morning blends into day or the mist outside obscures the passage of time. Either way, it matters little, — his thoughts are in too much turmoil to notice. 

He has no appetite to have breakfast. Instead, Zuko brews a cup of coffee (it tastes irritatingly of cigarettes) with the help of a silver-plated machine he had Eska install late into the night, and downs almost half of it in one go, scalding his throat, waiting for his brain to stop halting and replaying the evening in his buzzing head.

It doesn't. Zuko is used, essentially, to throwing his own failures in his face, quicker still than anyone else who could do it for him. It is a strange, destructive behavior, but he cannot stop, not after last night.

_You can't possibly think that nobody here wants you dead._

The words are a sobering ice in his veins. He shakes his head, coffee cup lowered onto a nearby table. Sokka's eyes glare at him, even as he closes his own, even when he refuses to acknowledge the blue of his walls.

_You're kept in warmth and blood and glory._

Zuko walks into the bathroom, snaking out of his robe in rough, violent movements. The blur of exhaustion from a sleepless night is gone, but he doubts it's because of the coffee. The shower is a scalding relief on his skin.

He'd been so fucking stupid. Thinking that Sokka had anything but his own interests in mind when shielding a stranger with his own life. Baking him fucking _cinnamon rolls._ (He'd thrown them out the moment he got the chance, while Sokka lay curled up in the snow, blue eyes closed against the pain Zuko knew was there.) Zuko is no stranger to violence, especially violence inflicted in fits of rage, but the sick feeling of betrayal still consumes him as soon as recollections of Sokka’s hands around his throat enter his memory, no matter how unbidden; he’d somehow hoped—

Hoped for— what? A friend? Sokka had said it himself. He thought of The Altair, the leading party of Ogni, as murderers occupying a throne that was not theirs, and Zuko was one of them.

_We know better than to shoot you when there's no alibi._

He knows what his uncle would say to that. That Zuko isn't like his father. That his family hasn't yet poisoned him, corrupted him to the bone. But Sokka— Sokka is _right_. He is a mirror, a younger, scarred version of a dictator, a murderer. It matters little that Zuko had never— had never _killed_ anyone. Sokka, and Morye, and everyone — they believe with reverence that The Prince is just as to blame as The Emperor for the entire world being a puppet. Morye corroded into slums. Zemlya reduced to a produce exporter. And Vozduh, a desert that had once failed to play by his father's rules.

He thinks of Nox and of Sokka's fingers on his neck. Then, he wants to think of nothing, but his dreams come to him if he closes his eyes, and his head hurts too much to keep them open against the flow of the water. So the prince can do nothing else but to climb out of the comfort of the stone-encrusted shower cabin, wrapping himself into plush towels and attempting not to revel in warmth and blood and glory, in a suite that should not be his, in a nation that should not be this shattered and bleak.

The day passes in a haze, and Zuko's headache only gets worse as he reads an invitation brought to him by Eska to a formal dinner with the town mayor herself, Aoki Hirahara, and he can think of little else but his bed as he pulls his hair into a topknot and pins it in place with a piece of gold jewelry, pulls on a shirt with ridiculous cuff links and downs another cup of coffee.

The mayor is a strange, oddly perceptive woman, and she questions Zuko on more things that he can answer without getting irritated over the course of a few tasteless meals in a nameless restaurant with faceless servants and an even bleaker interior, and by the end of it he's sick of Morye and answering questions his father should be there to respond to in person.

How does he know the approach The Emperor wants to take with the reparations of the town's crippling infrastructure if their entire country is enslaved? What good will a new educational program bring if all the students will be fed is Ogni propaganda?

He is no secretary, and his father is no leader. His father is a conqueror, and what he cannot conquer, he corrodes from the inside.

He hates this. He hates being royalty, and he particularly despises being royalty of Ogni, because Ogni is corrupt to the bone, Ogni cripples countries and burns down nations and cities as Lord Ozai watches.

Sokka's words haunt him the entire evening, and his gaze follows him everywhere. Zuko has half a mind to visit him again, try to come to an agreement, but it's an illogical thought, wishful thinking. Just because his eyes are an illuminating blue he cannot be granted forgiveness. Forgiveness? Sokka cannot be seen by The Prince. It's bad enough that Zuko is thinking of him too often. It's bad enough that his words scar his skin like the acid his father had poured over him six years ago.

His following night is restless, and he dreams little. There's an air of surreality to his next morning, but Zuko's head hurts too much for him to care.

Eska, having taken upon himself the responsibility of keeping Ogni's royalty fed and watered in a shitty down on the outskirts of a shitty world, delivers a cup of steaming coffee that tastes surprisingly good and a cream cheese bagel to the doorstep of Zuko's suite, along with a note — an invitation to lunch from Jee Saeki, some representative of some board of education, which Zuko really doesn't give a flying fuck about and declines with only a slight shadow of remorse.

The suite that had been a pleasant surprise to him upon his arrival is stifling, and no matter how many laps Zuko paces within its blue walls, the air does not clear, and his head continues pounding. The medicine brought by one of his guards does nothing, and Zuko wonders if half of the legal drugs sold in this town are fake, if Morye is capable of affording luxuries he had, his whole life, been taking for granted. 

No amount of pills can mute the voice that has been whispering into his bad ear from the moment he shut the door of his car and drove away from— from a Morye citizen. He forces himself to forget Sokka's name, Sokka's address, things he should have never known in the first place. Would he have ever invited Zuko out for a spice hunt if he knew who was hiding beneath that ridiculous disguise? Zuko knows the answer, but refuses to give it to himself — he'd had enough moping about for a weekend.

He misses home, sharply and abruptly. He misses falling asleep next to Azula, the (sometimes glaringly awful) taste of oolong his uncle would brew as cures for his constant migraines, he misses the cats that would twirl and tangle around his legs as he would pace the dim passageways of the palace. He misses his mother, but that memory hurts too much to think about, so he teaches himself to forget her face. 

Most of all, he misses the peace that his father had stolen from him— from Morye.

From Sokka. If not for The Emperor and his bloodthirsty methods, maybe the boy with the blue eyes would not hate him so much. Maybe he wouldn't blame him for crimes Zuko did not commit. Maybe, just maybe—

Maybe his father truly is the common denominator within the equation that is the hopeless state of the world.

Zuko doesn't know naïveté. He met evil when he was only a child, and he had become acquainted to its shapes and its veils, its gods and its demons.

He has been brought up to be nothing more and nothing less than the evanescent, gleaming image of a weapon, gunmetal in his hair and a vacuum to replace the emptiness between his ribs, desiring destruction like one hungers for release. But this— away from the palace, away from his father and his weapons, Zuko fears what he has become more than what he hasn't. 

It’s that final thought that drives him out of his suite in search for scenery, for serenity, in a world that no longer knows peace.

"Where are you heading to this late, Your Highness?" Eska asks from behind the register, failing to hide what seems to be an old magazine under the stacks of paper on the desk. Zuko ignores it in favor of wrapping a black scarf around his face. "Prince Zuko, the curfew—"

"Take me to where there's no curfew."

Eska stills, and the guards huddle together behind Zuko. "Your pardon?"

"Take me to where the patrols won't bother me. Isn't there one place in this town that doesn't have swarms of people?"

"But your suite—"

Zuko paints annoyance on his face with swift, practiced precision. "I got bored. I want a quiet, peaceful place, a few hours of doing nothing. A walk. Aren't there hiking places in these mountains?" He points obscurely to where the mountains must be, but ends up showing the direction of the elevators.

"Nobody uses these places for hikes any more, Your Highness—"

Zuko draws up his hood. "Yes, perfect. Do you have a map?"

That's exactly how Zuko ends up knee-deep in a crisp, dry layer of snow, with guards several meters away, their guns prepared to shoot anyone or anything that dares to approach The Prince, and for the first time in a few days he feels untethered, released. 

And that's exactly how Zuko finds himself lost, guards nowhere to be seen, the only source of life two shadows standing on the balcony of an abandoned, crippling wooden cabin in the middle of the woods, his thoughts scattering and ears straining, and then his heart skipping too many beats to ever resume its predetermined pace, because the voice he hears is Sokka's.

Impossible, he thinks. He must have fallen asleep right here in the snow, and he is dreaming. Nonetheless, he slips further into the shadows the pine trees paint like stripes over the ground, closer to the cabin, closer to the voice he swore he'd leave behind.

_"...no. Hakoda, he told me a lot about them, since they were friends. My mum was rarely present in the real world, that's what he'd say. And my dad, he was an airhead, too. At least I don't need to wonder if I'm a legitimate heir. But about life, about what it was like in there— I was three. I'm not supposed to remember everything. And with the— with the destruction— I don't think I ever want to remember what it was like."_

Legitimate heir?

The voice speaking now sounds foreign, and Zuko wonders if it's truly Sokka he'd stumbled upon, if fate really does enjoy playing jokes and tricks on him, or whether he'd imagined it all and it's two people out on a weekend in a cabin, nothing more and nothing less. And Zuko is the silly prince who'd decided to escape his responsibilities and get lost in the mountains. At least his guards aren't out there calling his name for the forest to hear, although Zuko doubts it that they aren’t searching left and right in growing alarm. He’ll worry about that later, though.

_"Do you think it can ever be rebuilt?"_

_"Vozduh?"_

This voice is entirely Sokka's. Zuko freezes, and his eyes strain to see who he is speaking to, yet to no avail — he cannot make out the silhouette of his own hands in the dusk, let alone two people. The wind carries their voices over to the prince crouching in the shadows, — a hunter and prey all at once.

_"I don't doubt it. Once I get to Ozai, it's over. And you're the prince. It's what you do. Build your kingdom, even if it means starting over."_

If Zuko thought his heart had stopped beating moments ago, it's nothing compared to now, at the mention of his father's name coming from Sokka’s mouth. The way he says it is cooler than hostility, runs deeper than disrespect.

What prince? _Build your kingdom?_

The impossibility of Sokka's implication startles Zuko enough to register that the shadow has left, and Sokka is alone.

_The prince_. There was only ever one more monarchy in the world before The Altair had it destroyed.

But that's— _impossible_. The prince had been murdered. Nobody was left alive. Zuko can't count how many times his father had retold him the tale of his conquests, his weapon of choice to slit the royal family’s throats in their chambers. His father is a conqueror, and conquerors spare no survivors, not even children.

Sokka doesn't seem delirious, however, and the air around Zuko is too cold for this to be a dream.

This means— _this means—_

A careless step backwards is all it takes for Zuko's powered guard to ricochet and for a branch to snap under his hiking boots. A curse escapes his lips, and Zuko freezes before turning and tiptoeing away as fast as he can, his heart racing, blood in his ears.

Once he's sure he's out of earshot, Zuko begins running. His entire world is reduced to means of escape, _he needs to think, to understand, to process—_

A hand grabs the back of his coat and hauls him off of the ground for a few split seconds before lowering him back onto the snow. Zuko's eyes are shut tight, hands balled into fists, and he thinks, _this is it._

"Were you being pursued?" One of his guards hisses, alarm and ease still too recent give way to a professional calm, and Zuko almost falls to his knees in relief. He’d somehow stumbled upon one of his untimely — or timely — saviors. Assembling his expression into something less panicked, he whirls around.

"No. I was looking for you. It's time to head back."

He is glad for the darkness which obscures the feverish flush to his cheeks, the frenzied gleam to his eyes as they begin their descent back into town.

Zuko thinks back to his father's face when he stood up after interrupting him in that meeting chamber, the thrill of doing what he had wanted to do for an abyss of time. The rush of adrenaline as he spoke out against The Emperor. _The heir to Vozduh's throne was killed with the rest of the royal family,_ he remembers his father boasting, over and over, to countless delegates and members of The Altair, to Zuko as he was falling asleep. _You're the only prince left in this world._

But the heir is alive, and Sokka plans to get to The Emperor — whatever that means — and nothing can kill the intoxicating surge of hope that draws Zuko under.

**SOKKA**

It takes Katara and Aang two hours to fall asleep. Two restless, hazed hours filled with dread and anticipation before Sokka can slither out of bed in the greying dusk, change out of his pajamas and wrap himself into his parka, the hilt of a knife a reassuring weight in his pocket, wishing he’d brought his gun.

He knew who had been seeking him out in the woods — the only person with as little experience to fuck up something as delicate as treading through a snowy forest and as much sadistic drive to spy on the three of them. He wonders how long Zuko had stayed, crouched, in those woods. He wonders if it’s already too late and if he leaves now, he’ll return to an empty cabin and the prospect of a life lived knowing that his sister and the Vozduh prince are either dead or forever imprisoned, just like his father. He wonders how much Zuko had heard, how many things he’d seen, how many pieces he can place together to form a horrifying picture of an impending revolution, of a movement against his own blood.

But he cannot stay. Sokka has lived though enough to step down now, and if The Prince has decided that Nox needs to be taken down, if Zuko had discovered this much from simply observing, Sokka will take him down with them, dead or alive. It’s a terrible thought, but it’s there, at the back of his mind, uncurling and ready.

The Prince has a way of surprising Sokka with a disconcerting capability for intelligence, making him wonder what he knows and who he has told. He’d fallen like snow onto Sokka’s head and clings to his hair, cold and numbing.

Whatever he’d seen, it’s too late to gauge his eyes out, and Sokka doubts he’d have the guts to do that, anyway, to anyone, even Zuko. It’s a question of who and when, of whether Zuko is too tired to break the news to— whoever, if he has yet to think things over, if he had actually heard everything Sokka has said.

It’s a long, cold walk, and by the end of it, once he steps onto the crumbling asphalt of a familiar road, Sokka’s teeth are clattering together and his ponytail has cascaded to somewhere around his neck, and he’s panting and his muscles ache for rest. But he sees it now — his town and his people, and he remembers standing in the paradoxical bliss of the cabin, the only sounds in the world being Katara and Aang’s untroubled breathing.

He has been the one to lead the tiger right into his home; only a coward would hide now.

He’s in the alleyways now, silent and alert, ears strained for the sounds of approaching patrols with the electric blue of their flashlights and the sickening red of their uniforms, but the person to wrap their fingers around his arm and haul him deeper into the shadows is one of his own.

“It’s not your _turn today,”_ Mai hisses into his ear, her fingers digging into his parka, “I told Katara I don’t want to be looking out for any of you guys roistering around here like fucking _mice_!”

She seems to have forgotten that mere days ago she has been on the verge of sabotaging the entirety of their movement; Sokka thinks sourly that he’d been finding himself in her position quite often since they’d last spoken.

He bites the indignation off his tongue before he gets himself wrapped up into another quarrel; he has no time. “Hello to you too. This is urgent. Mai, I need you to think. Remember Zuko?”

Even in the darkness, Mai’s sneer is unquestionable. She lets go of his arm, stepping away slightly, hands wrapping around herself.

“What about him?” 

“Do you know where he lives?”

Her sneer is a smirk. “Suki won’t be happy you’re into _royalty_ now.”

“This isn’t— _fuck_ , Mai, _no_!” He hopes the shadows are opaque enough to mask the feverish flush flooding his cheeks. “And Suki and I are on a fucking _break_! And this isn’t about being into Z— into _royalty_ —“

She laughs soundlessly, fingers flying to his mouth to muffle the rest of his sputtering. “No shouting when Mai’s on patrol. But you _did_ save his royal scum life. And you _did_ break up with Suki over him. And now you want to sneak into his bedroom in the middle of the night?”

Sokka wriggles out of her grasp. “I don’t have time for this. Just tell me where he is.”

“You’re not going to kill him, are you?”

“No,” Sokka says, and hopes desperately that his words are not a lie.

“Just checking. You could’ve guessed, you know. It’s that Emperor suite or whatever in the hotel. He’s been holed up in there for three hours or so. Went for a walk before that, we couldn’t follow him there. He’s kind of _occupied_ right now.” Her smirk widens.

Sokka, about to dart for the only hotel in their town, halts. “Occupied?”

“Oh, he’s been writing letters all night,” Mai cackles, and it reminds Sokka of Toph. But then her words register, and fuck, _Zuko has been writing letters._ The terror of knowing he’s too late deafens him momentarily. “We saw a messenger hawk fly out of his window not too long ago, insignia and all... Sokka?...”

Sokka slumps against the wall.

_He’s too late._

“Thanks,” he says weakly, but his mind is blank and cold, and all he can feel is regret. He hadn’t even gotten to say goodbye to Katara. He hadn’t told Gran Gran how much he loves her embrace. In a few hours, if not minutes, they will all be dead or imprisoned, and Sokka will be to blame.

As swiftly as it comes, the numbness leaves him, giving way to rage, boiling on the surface of misery. Not Sokka. The Prince. He straightens up, the weight of his knife an anchor. 

Sokka wonders if the Emperor will feel anything if one of his slaves shows up and tells him that his son was killed by a barely trained, barely legal fool. He wonders if he’s already done for if he can plan a homicide in cold blood. Nonetheless, these thoughts are nothing but background noise as he takes off soundlessly and swiftly, towards the alien building of the hotel, new and pristine in a rotting town.


	9. for the ashes of his father and the temples of his gods

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "So don't hurt me," Zuko says softly, and Sokka doesn't dare to look up from where his fingers are wrapped around his wrist, too cowardly to see the same wanting he feels in the pit of his stomach mirrored on the Prince's angelic face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This whole chapter is basically Sokka being whipped for Zuko

**CHAPTER IX**

**SOKKA**

The hotel looms unfamiliarly before Sokka as he finally reaches it, anxiety given in long ago to a calculated determination. The fire escape stairs are an easy climb for someone with a purpose, and Sokka has many of them, each one riskier than the last, each one deserving a punishment more severe. He cares little for the cold or for the rigid tenseness of his muscles, or for the thrill of excitement he feels as he places his foot onto the desired landing and registers that the window has been left open by the prince himself.

Sucking in one last breath of freedom, Sokka dives into the window soundlessly, through the curtain and into the strangely warm darkness of The Prince's bedroom.

The sight of the suite startles Sokka, but perhaps it's only because he hadn't prepared himself to see its resident so vulnerable. Nonetheless, there Zuko is, wrapped up into blue satins and duvets, hair like ink on his pillow, lips parted slightly, and there is no frown to his brow, only serenity, and for a second, Sokka's breath catches in his throat.

Perhaps he had hoped that the prince would be gone somewhere, off to discuss royalty matters. Or perhaps he would be waiting for him by the window with a weapon of his own, one on one, whilst Aang and Katara were being dragged from their beds and into shackles and shipped off to dark corners of a darker world. He didn't expect to see Zuko doing something as _human_ as sleeping.

Which is an irrational, unnecessary thought. Zuko bleeds red just like the rest of them — he'd made sure Sokka knew that.

There's no time to hesitate, to wait to see what the prince does next in his blissful doze, so Sokka, with the hilt of the only stable thing in his crippling world gripped tight, closes the distance between the opulent window frame and the opulent bed and the opulent sleeper, and leaps onto Zuko's slumbered form, one hand going to his throat and the other one pressing him deeper by his shoulder into the plush mattress.

The contact his own skin makes with Zuko's is an electric current. Sokka inhales sharply, amazed at his own capacity for doing stupid shit, and leans closer into Zuko's face, ignoring the desire to trace every inch of his surreal features with a long, undisturbed look. Zuko appears younger without his hair tight around his head, but deadly, still. 

"Wake up," Sokka hisses into his ear, the knife against Zuko's throat.

He expects the prince to leap up in the bed, to try to flail against Sokka's grasp. He expects everything but Zuko's eyes fluttering open and the expectant look he gives Sokka as they settle on him. His pupils are blown wide, the gold plate of the iris obscured by coals.

If he didn't know better, Sokka would say that the prince had been waiting for him. That he was never truly asleep.

There's nothing but a vacuum between their faces, and despite Sokka having seen his features up close two or three times before, there's something about Zuko's expression now, as though he is rueful. As though he is amused.

For a few moments, he is reminded of all the dreams he had, Zuko closer still, but his body is real beneath Sokka, a line of heat he has crossed when he'd caged the prince's torso between his knees. 

Sokka pulls back fervently, hand gripping Zuko’s bare shoulder so tightly that his knuckles whiten in the midnight afterglow. Bare, because the prince sleeps shirtless, because of _fucking course_ Sokka can't ever catch a break. 

He breathes in once. Counts to three in his head. Katara and Aang, in chains. His father. His grandmother. His mother. _Go for the throat,_ she whispers _. Don't hesitate._

"This is how this is going to go. If you scream, I slit your throat. If you lie, I slit your throat, too. Nod if you understand." Sokka's voice is barely a whisper, but he doesn't miss the way Zuko tenses under him, and it's a freefall down under, seeing him like this.The sight tastes like justice and something darker, something Sokka doesn't want to think about.

Reluctantly, Zuko nods, mouth settling into a dark line. With even more reluctance, Sokka exhales and relaxes his grip, but only slightly.

"I thought we'd already established that you wouldn't kill me without an alibi," Zuko whispers softly, his breath warm against Sokka's arm. He sounds — _fuck_ , he sounds almost _entertained_.

Sokka ignores the rebelliously upturned corners of Zuko's mouth, — as though he really believes that he'd would hesitate to slit his throat now, when he has nothing to lose. When Aang's identity has been revealed to the people Sokka was meant to protect him from.

"I don't care about an alibi anymore," Sokka whispers back. He has half a mind to dive deeper with the edge of the knife, to draw blood, but somehow, seeing the exposed length of Zuko's neck, somehow— "What was in the letter?"

The amusement flickers out of Zuko's eyes as he registers the question. For someone with a knife to their throat, he looks rather calm, and it's fucking unsettling.

"What letter?"

"Don't play with me, Zuko." Sokka's voice is dangerously low, far more decisive than what he feels like, but he'd missed the opportunity to ask himself what the fuck he was doing a long time ago, when he'd realized that the window to the hotel suite had been left open. Nothing matters anymore, not the possibility — he minuscule chance — of Zuko's bedroom being bugged, of being caught red-handed, because it's over, and all Sokka wants is closure before the very end."The letter you sent to whoever the fuck is on their way to the cabin. It was you, wasn't it? And you better answer honestly, because I'm the one with the knife."

They're too close for Zuko to hide a cornered panic under his lashes. "Yes," he says finally, eyes downcast. "I was a little surprised when you pulled it out on me like that."

Despite himself, Sokka laughs curtly. "So me climbing through your window was less of a surprise?"

Zuko's eyes find Sokka's in the darkness. "It wouldn't have been the first time someone did that."

"You have armed men with possible killing intent climbing through your windows regularly?" 

It's Zuko's turn to breathe out a distracting laugh. "They're usually unarmed."

It could be one of the many diverting tactics the prince had been taught, but he's terribly good at staying composed while half-awake with someone on top of them and a threat to his life. He's terribly good at making Sokka's thoughts take curious turns and forbidden routes.

He ignores the implication in Zuko's voice — because if he won't, there's a chance that Zuko's words mean something he's not ready to process, not in the position he's in. He shouldn't be thinking about anything but interrogation, essentially.

"I'll ask again," Sokka says after a pause, in which a devious smile returns to the prince's lips. He is so not fucking switching the power dynamics right now. "Why did you send out a messenger hawk right after returning from a hike?"

"I thought you wanted to know what was in the letter." 

Unbelievable.

Zuko is fucking _laughing_ at him, at _Sokka_ , who has all the intent in the world to pay for Aang's demise, to pay with pain and blood. It startles Sokka so much, this utter carelessness for his own life, that his hand slips from Zuko's tense shoulder and he has a second to readjust before his weight is directed to the hand with the knife and he harms Zuko before he has to.

His palm jolts to the prince's chest, and through the silk and the satin, Sokka suddenly feels the erratically rapid beat of his heart, chest rising and falling in quick, shallow breaths.

_Oh_.

Zuko is a good actor, but his eyes widen underneath Sokka, and his pulse skyrockets, and _not good enough._

Every next word Sokka utters is a staccato, rage condensed into a venom he doesn't know how to control, not yet. But the insinuation of Zuko's nervousness is evident, and it pleases Sokka more than he can admit, even to himself.

"I have _nothing_ to lose anymore." He says, voice low, palm open on Zuko's chest like a weapon in itself. It's a privilege, knowing that he is afraid. "And I can make you talk. It doesn't have to be your throat first." He holds a pause, eyes skirting over Zuko's scar, a path of violence.

The realization of his words settles in Zuko's eyes as they turn to slits. Sokka is heady with his own boldness, a bluff he's unsure that he'll be able to hold. Because when it comes to the Prince, he knows with a crushing certainty that he _won't_. Not when he can feel his heartbeat in his fingers, not like this.

It's impossible how many things he feels at once.

"The letter wasn't for my— nothing was in that letter," Zuko rushes out, and Sokka is startled out of his thoughts. _Right_. "Nothing about the— about him. Or you."

_Nothing about him._ Sokka’s blood runs cold. 

"So you know who you saw?"

"I did. And I know who you—“

Sokka freezes. "Don't say it. _Shut up._ How can I trust you? You understand that I can't trust a word you say? _Shit_." He averts his gaze over towards the window. He shouldn't be here, and this is fucking useless, and the prince has to be lying. He has to be stalling. Maybe he's just buying time, — something Sokka would do. He needs a cigarette. Or ten.

"I'm not _lying_!" Zuko's voice rises an octave, as though he's indignant at the fact that someone isn't taking his words for gospel, "Look, you can climb off me and go before you make things difficult, and confirm that he's alive, okay? I'm _not_ lying."

Sokka doesn't know what to say to that, but knows that Zuko is asking for too much, when he had been caught red-handed fucking _spying_ on them mere hours ago.

His words shouldn’t make sense. But _fuck_ , Sokka is so tired. He wants someone to trust, so desperately that it makes him shudder.

"Then what in the fresh hell were you doing in the woods? Happened to take a— a what? A walk?"

" _Yes_!" Zuko hisses in return, desperation seeping into his voice. Sokka is still refusing to look him in the eye.

Sokka exhales through his nose.

"Okay. So you happened to see him and I and then ran away, and then told nobody?"

"Yes," Zuko whispers, and Sokka finally looks at him, and the sight is both intoxicating and heady, because something has fallen from his expression.

Zuko isn't just undressed. The prince is an open book, and he is looking at Sokka like he wants him to read it.

Of all the things Sokka has ever done, this is the one that is seriously going to kill him.

"But why? Because if you know what you saw—"

"I saw hope."

Sokka is stunned into silence, hand clenching into a fist on top of Zuko's chest. The prince looks momentarily shocked at his own words, but his expressions are swifter than Sokka's.

"Can you climb off me now?"

Something in Zuko's voice pushes Sokka off the bed, and he backtracks towards the window, knife clenched in his hand. Watching him carefully, Zuko slowly sit up in the sheets, duvet slipping from the ridges of his torso, and Sokka has to look away before his cheeks burn, but it's too late. There's a fever in him he knows he can't sweat out.

Even without the golden jewels or the high collars of his suits, there is no mistaking royal blood in Zuko, all movements deliberate, like the way he throws his head back against the padded headboard and exhales, mouth parting. Like the way he rubs his fingers across his neck.

And Sokka _knows_. He knows he’d lost this.

It takes him a few tries to find his voice, and he has to clear his throat before it comes out all wrong. "Stop it with the diplomatic bullshit."

Zuko's eyes are still closed, hair falling over his toned shoulders, skin pale in the absence of light or color. "Okay. But truly, nobody's taken anyone you know captive, and nobody will." He lowers his gaze to meet Sokka's. "Unless you do something stupid." He gestures his finger between them, between Sokka in his secondhand parka, hair a probable mess and eyes glinting, and himself. "Something like this."

"If you're telling the truth—" Sokka begins out loud, but shuts up quickly. The tables have turned.

They have turned, and everything is at stake once again. And Sokka is threatening royalty with a knife, and he's fucked it up, like always.

"Hand over the knife."

"Like hell. I still have questions." _Give me more reasons to trust you._

"You can ask them without that hideous thing, can't you? Just hand it over so that I can put it away. We both know you need your alibi now." A rueful smile touches Zuko's mouth, as though he's sharing a joke with Sokka. 

Instead or responding, Sokka tucks it away into the inside pocket of his parka.

"Why haven't you told anyone?"

Zuko crosses his arms over his bare chest. "Can't you just be happy that I haven't?"

"I need to know if your reasons are good enough for me to leave without having to cut them out of you." Sokka leans against the window frame, mirroring Zuko's pose.

The prince heaves an irritated sigh. "Can we just stop with the knifing threats? They're a little distressing."

Sokka's literally about to strangle him. "Stop _stalling_. Your reasons," he growls.

He realizes, belatedly, that Zuko might be hesitating not because he doesn't know what to say, but because he doesn't want to say it. Either way, there's nothing in the world that matters more than the words on the tip of his tongue, and Sokka hopes urgently that they are going to be enough.

Zuko looks away. "I..." He gulps, his Adam's apple doing all sorts of things to Sokka's mind. He never would have thought that the sight of this Zuko, the unshielded, restless side of him, would be this distracting, but it is. "I might not agree with everything my father does. And coming here..." he trails off, words falling from his lips with a certain unease. "It was a wake-up call. Please, Sokka. I am telling the _truth_.”

Sokka cannot believe he's hearing a younger version of the Emperor saying such traitorous things. The climb through the window, the tiring run down the mountain to get here, it was all worth learning Zuko's views, because he— he sounds _sincere_. And he is looking at Sokka like he means it.

"Scandalous," Sokka cannot help taunting, the uninvited, sudden desire to smirk barely bearable. " _Mutinous_." 

"I get it," Zuko says flatly.

"So— you won't...?"

"I already _told_ you I'm not going to rat you out," Zuko hisses. He's doing a lot of hissing lately. "I won't get in Nox's way."

Sokka almost leaps out of his skin. "What the fuck are— don't _say_ that! You _can't_ _say_ that! The room might be—" he twists around himself in panic, eyes landing on every possible surface in the room, searching for bugs."I don't know what Nox is," he says, a little louder than necessary. Yeah, that'll convince them. He turns back to Zuko, eyeing him suspiciously.

The Prince rolls his eyes. "Nobody would dare bug my suite." 

Decisively, Sokka closes the distance between himself and the bed, and Zuko, suddenly alarmed, pulls the duvet over his chest, and in any other given situation, Sokka would laugh at how ridiculous he looks, but moments ago he was considering slitting his throat, so it seems a little untimely. 

He stops across from the Prince. "Who was the letter for?"

"My uncle," Zuko says quickly, eyes alarmingly intent on Sokka's chest, no doubt where the knife is hidden. "We talk by letters all the time."

"Okay." Sokka holds a pause, searching for the right words. "I'm going to be honest with you. You see, I'm." He halts. "I'm at a loss here. If I trust you and leave, and you turn out to be a rat, I won't have the time or the chance to pay you for this." He leans into Zuko's space, ignoring the way he seems to sink further into the headboard. "But if I hurt you now, without an alibi, it puts everyone I know at risk. Either way, I lose. Do you see now? See why I'm hesitating?"

He goes to lean away, but Zuko's hands are faster, and one of Sokka's wrists is caught in his nimble fingers. Sokka has been thinking that the only time their hands would ever touch outside of his dreams would be to block one other's punches during a fight.

This isn't a fight, this isn't a dream. He doesn't know what this is, but it leaves him cold.

"So don't hurt me," Zuko says softly, and Sokka doesn't dare to look up from where his fingers are wrapped around his wrist, too cowardly to see the same wanting he feels in the pit of his stomach mirrored on the Prince's angelic face.

Zuko's fingers leave his wrist and he leans back, expression unreadable. The northern wind picks up speed outside, and the curtains throw dancing shadows over the subtly intricate designs on the walls. Over Zuko.

"I don't trust you," Sokka says, registering how Zuko's shoulders tense at the words. "But I can't—" He pinches the bridge of his voice. This is a power play, and none of them are winning. "Okay. Okay. I can't talk here." He looks around the room. It's a display of opulence and luxury in a place that doesn't have enough money to feed the beggars freezing on the streets just below. "Do you have a pen? Paper?"

"On the desk," Zuko says, a little confused, but Sokka is already rummaging through the mess on the mahogany table filled with creamy thick leaves and quills and mechanical pens, and thin-rimmed cups upon cups of dried coffee, fingers tracing surreptitiously over torn phrases and crosses out lines.

~~_Please come. I can't think of anything alone._~~

~~_Uncle, the medicine isn't working as well as I'd hoped,_ ~~

He scribbles an address and a time on a new piece of paper, his handwriting a jumble of characters next to Zuko's elegance, and leaves it on the table. Turning around, he notes how Zuko hadn't looked away once.

"Meet me there tomorrow."

"I can't tomorrow," Zuko says reluctantly.

"The day after that, then." Sokka leans back on the table, fingers trailing over unsent letters and thoughts he shouldn't have read. "I'm leaving now."

Zuko nods, a curt, regal gesture, and no dream has ever come this close to fantasy.

Sokka realizes that Zuko hadn't even him asked why he wants them to meet again. He wonders what his life must be like if he wants to reunite with someone who had explicitly told him that they are plotting his murder, multiple times. 

He wants to ask him so many fucking questions.

He nears the window, back to Zuko, stopping there for a few moments, eyes unseeing, committing this strange segment of time to memory and locking it up. He refuses to think of what comes after he leaves. He refuses to think of Katara or Aang. What they’d achieved feelsboth like failure and victory.

"Sweet dreams," Sokka throws over his shoulder.  
  


Without waiting for Zuko's reply, he leaps through the window and onto the landing. His fingers tremble as he pulls his hood over his head.

They are closer than enemies now. The same mutinous idea binds them, the same longing. It is full of fury and it is cursed, but Sokka can think of nothing better and nothing worse than the phantom of Zuko's pulse under his fingers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love you all so much. Thank you for appreciating my work. It means the world to me, it does. I hope you are all safe and loved. 
> 
> See you in a few days!


	10. freedom is a pair of wings on your back, but folded they are dead weight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The person that has turned towards him looks frighteningly like the boy who’d tried to save and then threatened Zuko’s life. There is the same rebellious turn to her mouth, the same rueful set to her jaw.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I haven’t posted in about ten days — sorry for disappearing! law student things ;)   
> I hope you are all doing wonderfully and thank you for reading this <3 
> 
> P. S. guess who we will see interacting in the next chapter ;;)))

**CHAPTER X**

  
ZUKO

He had watched the weak light of the morning seep in warily through the cracks in the bruised sky ever since Sokka had jumped leaped out of the window.

Despite the latter's parting wish, Zuko's head had been swarming with too much treachery to even consider letting sleep take him under, and not even the sleeping pills he would take when his nightmares back in Ogni would get too much could help here, where his mind was restless.

And restlessness is in his bones, in the violence of his movements as he twists under the bedsheets, in the way the pressure of his own fingers on his neck reminds him of the kiss of a knife against his throat.

Even with the blade he had been holding, leaning over him in the dusk, it was Sokka who had been the threat to the prince's life.

His stomach twists in an exhilarating mix of fear and hunger, none of these physical, and Zuko finally decides to quit trying to doze off and pushes himself out of bed. He had been wanting to pace his room for the stretch of the night, but the blue of his walls felt more like a veil draped over his mouth and nose, suffocating him every time he got close.

The recollections of last night are not shattered by sleep, they are sharpened by how many times Zuko runs his fingers over their jagged edges.

The way he had left his window open after sending a letter to Uncle. He remembers little of what had been written there, a mix of _please just come, I haven't been thinking right_ and _don't you dare lecture me on anything in your next letter._

The feel of Sokka's hitched breath as it brushed Zuko's face, unaware yet that the prince had been waiting for him.

The realization that Zuko had been waiting his whole life to pay his father for all of his sins and his wrongdoings, knowing that death would not have been enough, that death would not have been possible for someone like him. That he had been hoping for redemption and Sokka had handed it to him, however resistant.

Zuko holds it in his hands, the power to burn his father where he had scathed him, and it's both sickening and euphoric.

The shower feels like whips on his skin as it warms up, and Zuko's mind begins racing again.

He never looks at himself in the mirror for too long, — Uncle had told him that practicing self-debasement in that manner would be quite detrimental — but Zuko cannot help leaning in as close as possible to the smooth panes of the glass, eyes intent on whoever stares back at him. He wonders if something in his face had changed. He wonders if treason now twists every one of his features into a face he knows not how to compose.

He feels too sick for breakfast, again, but too weak to pass on a doze of caffeine, and the coffee he brews is as black as it gets and as sweet as he wills.

_Do you see now? See why I'm hesitating?_

He would never believe that Sokka would have driven the knife deeper. That he was capable. But Sokka is untamed, untranslatable.

_Nox._

Zuko had completed his father's orders, in part, but he had betrayed his home and his nation, his kingdom and his royalty in the process.

And it feels like waking up, choosing the storm in spite of shipwrecks. 

  
  


Later, when he'd thrown up the coffee that had settled uncomfortably in his stomach, his entire system in edge, and brushed his teeth three times, he finally finds it within himself to rummage through the day's tasks.

Zuko's fingers are trembling underneath the crisp linen falls of the tablecloth, — whether it is from lack of sleep or from wondering whether he's about to be poisoned in a pristine, borderline opulent restaurant, unfitting for a place like Morye, he doesn't know.

Opposite him, the mayor pierces the leaf of her house salad with a decisive gesture.

He'd spent half of the morning getting prepared for the so-called brunch with Aoki Hirahara, a mess of nervousness and disheveled hair, and yet he sits still atop a curved chair now, poised and composed, his fingers the only giveaway.

"So you are telling me that you know nothing of The Emperor's future decisions regarding our nation?" She asks for the third time that gloomy morning, and Zuko forces himself to stare at the untouched breakfast on his plate instead of her face.

Aoki Hirahara has a strange way of undoing his buttons. Her ageless face gives nothing away, but the words she chooses have been picked long before, ripening on her tongue like berries.

When she speaks, it is a clear shot and no witnesses, and Zuko has nowhere to run.

"With all due respect," he begins, voice monotone, "why don't you just wait for my father to pay you a visit in two months? You could spare us both the inconvenience and get responses that are far less vague and much more diplomatic than mine, Mayor."

Out of the corner of his eye, he can see her tan fingers clench the empty cup of chamomile tea she'd ordered minutes ago.

"Forgive me if this inconveniences you, Your Highness. Was this meeting scheduled too early?"

Zuko's head snaps up, and he meets the cool brown inspection of her eyes, wishing he'd done something to his face, to his hair, to his scar.

It's not a scar, not to her. He doesn't know why, but the feeling that she'd been watching his life play out on his face like a movie is clawing at his insides, and—

He'd heard stories of witches from the mountains of faraway nations, but he'd never seen one, not up close. He'd never felt unsafe in his own skin like this, but the jades of her earrings dangle like an optical illusion, and the fact that he'd been awake for forty-eight hours is fucking with his mind.

He can see Nox everywhere. It stares up at him from his plate. He sees treachery in the mirror as he splashes water onto his burning cheeks in the onyx black bathroom of a restaurant that should not be this luxurious when people like Sokka—

He's going fucking crazy, that's what's happening. He wishes uncle was with him, a longing so acute that for a second, he can't breathe.

The mayor cocks her head to the side. Her earrings gleam like trinkets he'd seen at the market. Like deceit.

"I slept fine," Zuko rushes out. "My mornings always start... early."

"I noticed you haven't touched your food. Are the eggs not cooked to your liking?"

_What do you want?_ Zuko wants to ask. Now that he knows — _don't think that nobody in this town wants you dead_ — he cannot help the stifling paranoia that is crawling up his spine.

"If we have nothing to say to one another that matters, please excuse me," Zuko replies instead, his voice as detached as he can make it. Maybe he'll go and sleep whatever the fuck is going on with him in his suite. Maybe he'll even leave the window open.

"Your Highness, your comfort is of utmost importance to me as a mayor of this town," Aoki Hirahara says, her voice as detached as Zuko's, and he shudders. He doesn't know what she wants with him, but it cannot be good, not when her eyes pierce through every carefully crafted facade of his princely persona. "I would hate it if the Royal family got an impression of Morye that is not... desirable."

He almost laughs at that. If they walk outside, there is nothing that can hide the utter horror that his father had made out of the place.

"I am enjoying my stay," he lies through gritted teeth. "But I am indeed feeling unwell, and if I may be excused—"

"Wait," she says, and Zuko stills.

None of them blink as she opens her mouth. Zuko wonders if she's about to talk him into tripping over himself off of a cliff and blame it on the winds.

"I invited you here precisely because your answers to my questions hold no diplomacy. You speak the truth."

It seems as though all other sounds fade away.

"I am asking you as a person, Prince Zuko. Tell me of your father's plans for us. For our home. If he decides that we are no longer of use to Ogni..." she gulps, and her eyes are desperate. " _Please_."

Later, in his rooms, Zuko will remember many things his father had done once he deemed something as no longer useful.

It will come in shards, and they will cut as deeply as before.

Zuko will remember the bodies his father would leave in rooms after interrogations, broken limbs and bloodshot eyes, staring at nothing. It will make the prince recall the bruises he'd gotten used to seeing on his own ribs, so many dark nebulae that they could be mapped out into constellations against his skin.

He will remember Azula trying to crawl away from the whip.

He will wonder what it will feel like to stand before The Emperor as a traitor.

"If my father decides that you are no longer of use," Zuko says lowly, finally getting up from the table, "there will be nothing you can do."

Zuko cancels all the meeting he needs to attend later on in the day without remorse and forces himself into bed, willing his swirling thoughts, but as night dawns on the mountains, sleep doesn’t come, and instead, exhaustion pulls him under into hallucinations he can give no name to.

A fever he knows is an illusion breaks over his skin, and the crack of his father’s whip rushes like blood in his ears, and he is kneeling in front of the throne he’d sat on as a child, a throne he is no longer fit for.

His father speaks into the darkness of the blue bedroom.

_My son, a traitor. You have found Nox.  
_

_You have found death._

Tomorrow floods the windows with a pale fog, and Zuko stumbles out of bed, delirious and exhausted, downs a cup of coffee like nectar, and attempts to pull his hair into a topknot, but his cold fingers are shaking too much.

The time on his watch reads four forty a.m., and he has twenty minutes before he meets Sokka next to what used to be a bunker near the river canal. The thought is like an injection of adrenaline into his veins.

He orders his guards to stay put, and it is not as though the request is unprecedented.

It’s just that Zuko had never used his power to meet a traitor of the state before.

The town is deserted, and fresh snow that has not yet melted crunches under Zuko’s polished boots. The sky looms overhead like a grey hound, unwavering, but he pays it little mind. _He gets to see Sokka again._ Distantly, Zuko wonders whether he’d brought a knife of his own. Perhaps they could spar, no intent to hurt, but a desire to wake one another up instead. Maybe Zuko just wants to press a weapon to Sokka’s tanned neck for a change.

Time is flowing too fast for someone who has not slept for three nights.

It is five on the dot when the prince finally rounds the final corner to see a shapeless mass of metal in front of a five-floored apartment block, but Sokka is not yet there.

_If this is a fucking trap,_ Zuko thinks. If this is a trap, Sokka is going down with him, one way or another.

He stands there for a few minutes, catching his breath, leaning against the cold, rusted metal of the bunker. His eyes close momentarily, exhaustion like heavy wings on his back.

When he opens them again, it is five ten, and Sokka is either late or Zuko had gotten the location all wrong, or there’s a patrol out to chain him and throw him into a cell. Three options, and only one of them is mildly irritating.

But Sokka— Sokka doesn’t seem the type. If he’d wanted Zuko arrested, he would have done that already.

Besides, the animal trapped within his eyes spoke too much of a deep desperation for Zuko to think that he could neglect their meeting.

Ten minutes turn into twenty, and Zuko’s fingers begin to numb. Instead of a knife, he wishes he would have brought gloves and a warmer coat, but he stands with no weapon nor warmth, sleepy and frustrated and confused, wondering who the fuck told Sokka that it is okay to be late to a meeting with a fucking prince. 

He wonders whether he should be worried when half an hour passes without a sign of the boy that had been desperate to meet him only a day before.

“Fuck this,” Zuko spits out after forty minutes of standing next to scrap metal in a sudden wet snowfall, and peels himself away from the bunker.

There is little remorse for leaving in his mind, only senseless anger, and perhaps a taste of humiliation on his tongue as he curses Sokka under his breath. He doesn’t know what to think.

Zuko wonders whether he’s dreaming. He wonders whether Sokka is alright. He’s been wondering a lot these days, and nothing but paranoia comes of it, but it is a habit he cannot surrender.

He takes his time in his way back, mind rushing restlessly with illogical, bitter reasons. Sokka needed this meeting more than him, certainly, but there is no explanation as to why he could be _forty minutes_ late. Zuko pulls the hood of his coat over his head as though it’d personally wronged him and quickens his pace as much as his weakened state can allow.

_It’s fine that I’m leaving_ , he thinks to himself. _It’s his fault._

Once the hotel is looming over his head, he can’t think of anything else but sleep and Sokka’s whereabouts, and by the time the door to his suite beeps with a green light, the lids of Zuko’s eyes are heavier than lead.

His pillows are a welcome satin hue as he collapses onto the bed. 

Voices in the hallway pull him out of a blissful darkness. He would have slept through the commotion, but the prince has been taught by his own bitter experience that a tone of voice as agitated as the one he’s hearing leads only to either violence or a mental breakdown, and it is too close to his door for comfort.

Rolling over to the side of the bed, he pushes strands of hair out of his face and crosses the suite, pressing his good ear against the cool mahogany of the door, slightly disoriented.

“— _see him!”_

“I _beg_ of you, go home. You can’t just show up here and expect an audience—“ Eska’s voice jumps up and down an octave, but the voice that answers him is unfamiliar both because it’s so desolate and so... _feminine_.

“I don’t want a goddamned _audience_! I just need to tell him— something!”

“How did you even reach this floor without getting stopped?” Eska whines, and it seems as though he knows the speaker — the familiarity of the you, the slight accusation in his tone. Zuko flattens himself against the door, the morning coming back to him in waves.

“That’s not important. Eska, Sokka’s in—“

The door of Zuko’s suite bursts open, and the prince falls through the doorway, the coat he’d slept in rumpled beyond repair and boots still on his feet.

“Sokka?” He snaps, eyes landing on a strangely familiar face with eyes the shade of blue he’d gotten far too much of back in his bedroom.

The person that has turned towards him looks frighteningly like the boy who’d tried to save and then threatened Zuko’s life. There is the same rebellious turn to her mouth, the same rueful set to her jaw.

“ _Prince Zuko_!“ the girl and Eska speak in unison, both of them rushing towards him, Eska with an apologetic desperation and the visitor with a determined rush.

Zuko leaps out of their reach.

“Who are you?” He asks, hands on the doorframe, eyes inspecting the flush of the girl’s cheeks and the familiarity of the white fur on her parka. He remembers it brushing against his own cheek.

Why is she wearing Sokka’s—

“There’s really no time,” she entreats, words a rushed out wheeze. “I don’t know why, but he asked me to hurry and get you—“

“Who?” Zuko speaks dumbly.

“It’s Sokka,” she divulges, an urgency to her words that has been there all this time. “Please, Your Highness—“

“Sokka,” he repeats, and sleep finally leaves his mind, “where is he?”

Beside the girl, Eska is gesticulating wildly for the prince to go back to his suite, but neither Zuko nor the strange girl pay him any attention as her next words settle in the air between them.

“He’s gone,” she says. “The patrol took him.”


	11. you look like war, you taste like surrender

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All too suddenly, Zuko is leaning into his space across the middle seat, and his scent envelops Sokka, and he can see the blue surrounding Zuko's eyes, deep circles telling of sleepless nights, and it is as though he is back in the darkness of his suite, in the realm of his dream. It is difficult to discern anything from reality anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *sprinkling angst into this chapter* they can have a little bit of angst, as a treat  
> *spills the entire angst shaker* f-fuck

**CHAPTER XI**

SOKKA

Everything around Sokka is cold.

The floor he's lying on numbs the beginning of a dull pain just below his ribs, and the bars of the cell he leans his forehead against offer a welcome coolness, — _this,_ he doesn't mind, but there's a chill in his bones not even a fever can sweat out.

Still, he regrets nothing, letting anger drown out everything else.

Anger, in the end, is better than fear. It is better than guilt. It is better than regret.

The room outside of the cell he'd been thrown into mere hours ago is just as stifling as what he feels inside, but at least the patrolmen outside get to sit on chairs with a pillowed seat at desks with lamplights, and he's pretty sure he hears the whistle of a teapot coming to a boil in the adjoining room.

The station he'd been taken into is somewhat familiar, but he'd never been there like this. Caught like an animal. Baited like a shark and brought upon the deck to chop off its fins.

The events of the morning play out in his head like an annoying reminder of his own incompetence, of his impulsiveness.

It'd been an instinct to bristle up the moment he saw two patrolmen in shiny red uniforms snooping around the entrance to the Jasmine Dragon, and, despite the place had been locked still since the early morning, they looked expectant, wary. It'd been an instinct to push Katara behind his back and out of their line of sight. It'd been an instinct to sneer once their gazes landed on Sokka.

Instinct has many virtues, but its vice is damnation.

"Curfew's been over since four in the morning, comrades," Sokka bellows, and the patrolmen startle on the grey snow. Their faces are flushed underneath their caps, eyes hungry. Distinctly, Sokka registers the wooden batons strapped to their waists and no doubt loaded guns in their pockets.

His sneer is mirrored on their faces as he finally comes to a stop in front of the cafe. Something about their poise entreats Sokka to wait before taking the keys out of the pockets of his jeans and unlocking the front door to the cafe. He thanks the sky for making sure Aang had switched locations yesterday, right after coming down from their cabin in the afterglow of the morning mist.

"Are you the owner?" One of them asks, the one with the beefy face, and Sokka wonders if he's new — he'd never seen him before despite his regular acquaintances with the patrols around their town.

"We already had our cafe _inspected_ last week," Katara cuts in from behind Sokka's back, and he steps down onto her booted foot in warning. _Don't engage,_ he thinks furiously. _Let me deal with it._

Tables toppled over, teabags spilled onto counters, coffee beans crunching under Sokka's feet in the aftermath. Every search in every place is brutal and threatening in a way crueler than if they'd just smashed their windows, although he'd seen places that they had done that to if the owners had been particularly reluctant to cooperate.

"We've come here for a cup of tea, that's all," the other one cuts in, baring his teeth in a manner so utterly condescending Sokka wants to count them out of his mouth one by one. He reminds himself that in less than half an hour, he will meet Zuko by the bunker, and finally get some clear answers to the questions burning his tongue. He forces himself to think about the satisfaction of knowing that a figure of royalty now stands within the rows of his own chess pieces. 

Somehow, the thought of seeing the prince hitches his breathing instead of slowing it down.

"We don't serve the likes of you in this cafe," he states, a little more bravely than what he feels like, and the satisfaction of seeing their eyes widen is almost enough to send him reeling. He waits a few seconds, savoring the moment, before continuing. "What I mean, comrades," he rushes out, seeing how their hands reach for their batons — _seriously!?_ — "is that I doubt the stuff here'll be to your liking. We buy the cheapest coffee beans and teabags, not to mention the food."

He smiles, wide and fake and apologetic, loving the way their faces elongate in confusion. It's rare to see a patrolman with more than a few thoughts of his own, as they have been, in Sokka's eyes, reduced, condensed down to violence and order.

But then, they look at Katara behind him, and the hunger returns to their eyes, and everything goes to shit.

He never lets their words, slurred or muttered, shouted or hissed right into his ear, derail him,but the moment his family is touched by something he should be protecting them from, Sokka goes feral. It's easy for Katara to hold him back, usually, but the acid in his veins from his recent anxieties strains his muscles, and the few broken phrases that drop from the lips of the patrolmen end up in blood on his knuckles and one of them stuffed into the snow.

_We'll find something to enjoy._

It is a new level of low, even for the state police.

It's a downfall from there — the baton lands precisely where he'd been kicked by one of Zuko's guards a few days before, and Sokka kneels over, panic and darkness blinding him. Behind him, Katara screeches, and his eyes catch the movement of a polished red boot before he's shoved into the snow himself. The pain is almost enough to take him under on it's own, but it serves as a reminder instead of a similar figure leaning over him, gaze just as intense, and Sokka's consciousness resists.

He's pushed over onto his back, snow melting beneath the collar of his sweater — Sokka recalls, fadingly, draping his parka over Katara's shoulders on their way to work. She stands there, obscured by two bleeding silhouettes, hands clenched on her mouth. 

A moment later he's shoved back up to stand, but his legs give out under him, and he is back on his knees. Blood wells in his mouth.

Okay, maybe he _did_ go overboard. A little.

"Get up," the one he'd punched spits, baton right in the line of Sokka's crazed gaze. "I'm not dragging you."

" _Don’t!_ Please," Katara begins, and Sokka wishes she'd shut up, "where are you taking him?"

They don't look back at her, and Sokka can't look away from her eyes. He wants to tell her that everything will be fine. That it's not his first time getting beaten up by batons. That they won't say shit to her again. That the split of the patrolman's lip hurts more than his abdomen.

But he's tired of lying, so instead he mutters, under his breath, "Little dumpling."

"What?" Katara breathes, hands outstretched towards him, but one of them shoves her away.

Stars are swimming in his eyes.

His ponytail ends up in one of their gloves hands and he's dragged upwards, hissing, as though he's nothing more than a stray cat. Sokka regrets losing control so easily, regrets punching whoever the fuck is pulling him now, regrets Katara's memory and his own fucking anxiety.

"Get little dumpling," he says, barely a whisper, and then, louder, "I'll go on my— _ow! Fuck!"_

And this is how, a few hours later, he's stuck in one of the thousands of identical stations planted throughout Morye like weeds, holding enemies of the state just like himself, and the uncertainty of his future is a stutter to his racing heartbeat.

He's never been in such deep, serious shit before.

Almost as an afterthought, Sokka wonders how long Zuko had waited for him before leaving. He wonders if he's mad. Something about Zuko feeling anything alike to irritation because of Sokka is a balm to his wounded pride.

He doesn't dare to speak. Instead, Sokka inspects the dull prospects of his situation, and finds no route to a light at the end of this tunnel. His only hope is the prince, but even if Katara's gotten his cryptic hissing, he doubts the prince will risk showing his face in something as close to the state and its regime as a patrol station.

The one thing he knows for certain is that he'd fucked up.

His throat itches for the calming sear of a cigarette, — the pack, alongside a blue lighter, is in the inside of his pocket, but he doubts it's something the man with greying hair at the wooden desk outside would enjoy.

"Sir?" Sokka tries, and his voice comes out all wrong, rough and criminal. "How long are you going to keep me here?"

The man doesn't look up, but his fingers twitch where he's holding his pen, and Sokka's abdomen responds with a sudden, sharp ache. They couldn't have broken one of his lower ribs, could they? _Fuck._

Is this what his father had felt like?

He leans his back against the bars, careful not to move his middle too much. The snow outside of the little window near the ceiling is still light, but he has no idea of the passage of time. Sokka only wishes he could collect the snow collecting out on the windowsill and press it to his burning skin.

He hears the door hit the wall as it swings open a second before voices rush in, his eyes snapping open from where they'd fallen closed.

Everything's a blur as he whirls around on the floor, but the sharpness of Zuko's cheekbones is unmistakeable amidst the haze.

The enemy to the blood in his veins, come to his rescue. The hero bound to him by their own shared sin. Zuko turns to him, his eyes indecipherable, pupils blown so, so wide. 

Sokka's thoughts are too loud to hear the words coming from the prince's mouth, but the grey-haired man rushes over to unlock the door to his cell, and Zuko steps into the line of the electric light, blocking it like he had done too many times before, like a figure of divine origins come to mess up Sokka’s mind.

"Get up," Zuko orders, voice colder than the bars, and only because it is cold can Sokka understand it. He blinks, unable to move, realizing belatedly that he is once again on his knees and he is frozen and he is either dreaming or hallucinating, or both.

Cursing under his breath, Zuko reaches out, hand a blur of white, and, grabbing Sokka by his forearm, forces him upright. The world tilts, and the prince's eyes furrow in confusion, but Sokka is too focused on biting back a hiss of pain to notice.

Zuko is all-encompassing, fury buried deep beneath his movements. Sokka wonders what had gotten him so angry. He wonders if he'd ever be able to get the prince so wound up. Realizing that it's is neither a dream nor an illusion, his eyes dart over to the man who'd been sitting at his desk, head bowed, fearful to look up.

Zuko's fingers clench around Sokka's arm as he drags him through the little room and into the spruce gray light of the day outside, and everything is too painful to be unreal.

Zuko has come for him.

The thought is striking, unnatural, aggravating. The thought leaves Sokka feverish all over. The thought should not feel this much like a litany. Like a prayer.

"Zuk—" Sokka tries, but the prince shoves him forward and onto the road.

"Not now," he cuts off, voice strained.

The door to a sleek black car opens in front of them, and Sokka is once again shoved forwards, but this time he falls into the light beige salon of _Zuko's car_ , the scent of expensive leather shaking him awake as he tries to scramble upright in the backseat.

The car only holds the driver and Zuko, once the latter slides elegantly beside Sokka, closing the door softly behind him. Another elegant gesture — the press of a carefully crafted button — and a panel slides between the driver and the back of the car, a pane of tinted glass diving the prince and the traitor from the man at the wheel.

Only when the panel slides all the way does Sokka let out a long, confused breath. "Okay. What the fuck?"

Zuko, whose eyes hadn't left the button ever since pressing it, stills. The car starts, and the station is left behind them in a few moments. Sokka feels something unwinding in his gut as he looks back.

"It wasn't me," the prince says softly, eyes gazing unseeingly ahead, the cold from a minute before melted away to leave something raw and unsettling in its place.

"What?" Sokka asks again. The seat is plush behind his back, and he leans into it, letting his muscles relax. There's something of fantasy to Zuko right now, his sharp chin illuminated by the soft blue light of the interior of the car, his black coat like armor on his shoulders.

His eyes finally reach Sokka's and the fury is still there, no matter how much the prince tries to hide it.

"It wasn't me," he says again, clearer this time, each word like a stone falling into still waters. "I didn't say anything to anyone. Believe me, Sokka."

_Oh._   
  


His gaze is so, so intense. 

_My god_ , Sokka wants to say. _My god, you look so much like war. You look so much like surrender._

"I know," he says instead. Now that it feels like they are alone, he finds it difficult to speak. Instead, his thoughts drive him back to an evening mere days ago, when Zuko's pale skin was flush under his fingers, when his throat was in his hands. A smile finds itself onto Sokka's cracked lips. "You came to save me instead." 

Zuko leans back in his seat. He runs his fingers through the tar black of his hair. It is collected into a knot atop of his head, but a few strands have escaped, rebellious, and they frame his face in a way that looks so gentle, so unlike Ogni or this world's emperor.

A few beats of silence pass between them, and Zuko's eyes are closed the entire time. For the first time that day, Sokka realizes how tired the prince looks.

"A life for a life," Zuko says finally.

Sokka scoffs, but the gesture sends a jolt of pain through his system, and it comes out more like a choke. "Sorry I didn't make it to our meeting."

"Your sister found me about an hour after that." The prince's eyes are still shut, long eyelashes casting shadows across high cheekbones. "She told me all about how you were taken. I find it strange that you hadn't told her about... our agreement."

Sokka bristles at his words. "There's no need to involve my family."

Zuko's eyes flutter open, finally, but instead of going to Sokka's face, they inspect the rigid set to his shoulders.

"She also told me about the beating." He leans closer, and Sokka catches the scent of smoke and something else, something violent, "tell me, do you often get in trouble with the law?"

It is a powerful instinct to lean away from Zuko's inquisition, but Sokka stays still. He'd had enough of his instincts for today. Just _why_ , out of all things, would Katara tell Zuko _that_? 

"It's not my first time getting beat up," Sokka divulges, gaze averted to somewhere behind Zuko, towards the grey mass buildings flying past them as the car speeds up. "I got what I deserved, anyway, after punching one of them."

If there's a mock to Sokka's words, Zuko chooses to ignore it, but his eyes turn to slits nonetheless, and his scar is drawn closer to the bridge of his nose as his eyebrows furrow.

"This is not something you get to fucking _deserve_ ," he says, low and full of fury. "Sokka, you have to stop trying to get arrested. We're on the same side, and—"

"Oh, so you think I trust you now?"

_How dare you think I trust you. Don't think I haven't wondered whether this is your doing._

The words clearly startle the prince. "I thought that after getting you out of there—"

"Do you mind if I smoke?"

Zuko blinks up at him. "What?"

Instead of replying, Sokka fishes the pack of cigarettes and the lighter from one of his pockets. Placing it between his lips, he presses the button to open the tinted window of the vehicle slightly for the smoke to swim through. Then, eyes intent on Zuko, he flicks the wheel of the lighter and his cigarette sparks to life.

Only after he'd taken a long drag does Sokka relax. The world seems a little less hazy thanks to the nicotine and the searing clarity of the distaste in Zuko's stare.

"I do mind," Zuko hisses.

The smoke doesn't reach his face as Sokka exhales. "We're on the same side now. You should learn to tolerate my vices."

All too suddenly, Zuko is leaning into his space across the middle seat, and his scent envelops Sokka, and he can see the blue surrounding Zuko's eyes, deep circles telling of sleepless nights, and it is as though he is back in the darkness of his suite, in the realm of his dream. It's difficult to discern anything from reality.

It is difficult to focus on anything else but the way Zuko's fingers brush his lips as he plucks the cigarette from Sokka's parted mouth and flicks it out of the car through the crack in the window, never once breaking eye contact.

There's a wildness to the prince that hasn't been there before, a dizziness.

He can practically taste Zuko's next words.

"You have nobody else to trust."

He leans back, expression set into stone, and Sokka's heart is racing. Zuko reaches for something in his pocket, and Sokka's eyes widen when he realizes what the object he's holding in the palm of his hand is.

"The lines are clean," the prince says, dropping a burner phone into Sokka's lap. "I waited for quite a while for you earlier. The situation could have been avoided if you would've had a way to contact me."

"We can't have phones," Sokka mumbles, still recovering from Zuko's sudden closeness, "we're not allowed."

Zuko's gaze is impassive.

"Then try harder to hide it."

The car comes to a sudden halt, and Sokka realizes they're right in front of his apartment block, and he thinks, _finally_ , and also a traitorous _not yet._

"Wait for my call," the prince says, and the door opens behind Sokka to let him out. "And it’s better if you tell your sister everything."

Because anger is better than fear, because it is better than longing for something you shouldn't be able to want, because it is better than hope, Sokka sends Zuko a glare before turning away from him to climb out of the car.

The words he spits back are full of anger, and it hides Sokka's fear and longing and hope so intricately that even he is surprised at his own capacity for cruelty.

"You have nobody else to trust either,” Sokka hisses, shoving the door closed behind him. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> how did you like this? let me know <3 your comments are always *chef’s kiss*  
> Hope you are all safe and loved!


	12. all pleasure in life is only relief

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Am I courteous to you in your dreams, Prince Zuko?" 
> 
> This time, the pause that follows is abrupt yet sharp. Sokka wonders if there's a limit to Zuko's patience and whether he'd long ago crossed it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You don’t hate me for the long wait, do you? 

**CHAPTER XII**

SOKKA

When Katara answers the door, her eyes are rimmed with red so thickly that Sokka wonders if Suki had stopped by to play with his sister's makeup and face.

Then, he remembers that Suki hasn't come over since he'd promised her not to tell anyone about her own failed revenge and asked her to leave him alone.

Sokka doesn't know if he regrets or relishes in the consequences of his words.

It is a difficult thing, explaining to Katara why he'd begged her to run to Zuko. It's more difficult to explain why he trusts him. It's impossible to explain how they came to be—whatever this is. How the prince of Ogni, the heir to the Emperor's tyrannical regime, is now one of them.

Wordlessly, she leads him to the kitchen — it smells faintly of steamed vegetables and rice, and Sokka's mouth waters, — but on the table, instead of plates heaped with steaming food, lays a notepad and a pen, and Zuko's words echo in Sokka's mind. _It's better if you tell your sister everything._

Well, fuck.

Fifteen minutes and a few scribbled out lines later, Sokka slides the notepad back to Katara, who hadn't said a word to him ever since he'd entered the apartment. Sokka wonders whether it's because her words may jeopardize Nox if heard or because she's really, _really_ pissed. 

_okay, so. I don't even know where to begin. and you're looking at me all scary, so I better be quick. sorry if my handwriting sucks, I'm kind of ready to faint and everything._

~~_so, zuko told me that_ ~~

_nevermind. I met zuko a few times and now we have to trust him. that's the bottom line of what you need to know._

_and I don't trust him at all, for the record. but he came for me back in the patrol station. and he seems sincere._

_and we have no other choice._

_sorry?_

He can see tears of frustration welling in Katara's eyes as she reads on. She mouths the ending lines, terrified, and Sokka's heart sinks a little.

  
She begins scribbling on a flipped page, quick and decisive, and his stomach is in knots and his throat keeps closing up. 

_Fuck, fuck, fuck._

So many questions of hers can shove him into a corner where the only escape is exposing Suki's neck or risking his.

Soon enough, the notepad is on his end of the table once more.

Katara begins mumbling something about her day at school to fill any suspicious silence as Sokka reads the notes she'd left.

It kills him to know that he's the source of her state. Of her fear.

He wishes, with all his might, to defeat whatever it is that is eating him from the inside, to expunge whatever is corroding the nation, a poison opulent and effective, but it's proving difficult and deadly.

_I asked Zuko about how you'd met but he wouldn't tell me anything. (_ Sokka exhales internally). _You have to understand that I'm scared for you. And going around talking about Nox to the prince? Sokka, what is it with you? Hadn't we just discussed with Aang that the plan is already in motion? Why would you want to derail that?_

There's a lump in his throat. He'd fucked up in her eyes.

Again.

Fuck Zuko and his advice, honestly.

_You have to tell me more. Later. you're probably tired since your handwriting is unintelligible right now. Later, show me your ribs. I have to make sure you haven't broken anything._   
  


“Are you hungry?” She asks after a guilty silence on Sokka’s part. 

Sokka pushes the notepad away from him. "I don't think I can eat right now," he confesses half-heartedly, but his next words are so serious that Katara's eyes snap up from a string in the tablecloth she'd been twisting ever since she'd finished writing. 

"And, Katara? Forgive me."

He'd been waiting for Zuko's call, stupidly, for three endless hours, and something begins gnawing at Sokka's insides.

He manages another twenty minutes before getting up from his bed, a movement too sharp for a bruise too fresh, and heads for the door. A blind spot in the listening and observing regime governing over morye is hidden at the corner of their apartment block, a place fit for meeting and calling and— not now.

There, wrapped up in a coat and a scarf, he dials the only number listed in the contests list, and attempts to convince himself that the trembling of his fingers has everything to do with the cold.

The phone rings a few times before cutting the call off. Unanswered reads on the pixelated screen, and there's lead on Sokka's tongue as he dials once more.

It is on the third try that Zuko finally deigns to answer the phone, and yet, for a second, Sokka's mind goes blank.

The line is silent on the other end of the phone, and Sokka, stretching out his arm, stares at it in confusion.

"Hello?..." he tries, and hears the tail of a muffled curse once the phone is pressed back to his ear. "Uh, it's. Me."

" _Yes_ ," comes Zuko's voice, hoarse and dazed.

"Are you okay?" Sokka mutters, suddenly unable to form sentences longer than a few words. _Why does the prince's voice have to sound so vulnerable?_

" _Yeah, I'm—_ " there's a shuffling on the other end. " _I lost track of time._ _I'm fine."_

Something tightens in Sokka's chest, something bittersweet, and it scares him more than the patrols outside, and the snow whirring around him, and the gun under his pillow back at the apartment.

"I can't believe you." He finally says, the shadow of a merciless laugh in his words. 

The sky grows inky, bruises disappearing from the horizon like the pupil of an eye obscuring the iris. Sokka's fingers itch for a cigarette, but cigarettes remind him of Zuko until he sleeps the memories off.

_"Excuse me_?" The composure is back to the prince's voice, but Sokka isn't fooled.

"You were _sleeping_."

He can practically see Zuko seething on the other end.

" _Don't tell me you were preoccupied for my wellbeing."_

It's Sokka's turn to sneer. "In your dreams, _Your Highness."_

The line is silent for a few moments. The snow seems to stand still as though it is a slow-motion movie, the kind that was popular before anything related to the past was outlawed by Ogni.

The kind that Sokka's family now hides underneath Katara's textbooks.

_"I do see you in my dreams."_

Sokka doesn’t feel like sneering anymore. 

The words seem carefully crafted, but they are a low blow, and Sokka feels a flush returning to his face. The prince can't read minds, can he?

Zuko cannot know enough to realize that Sokka is the one who should be saying those words.

He composes his tone into a calmer version of the tautness he feels within before responding, but the phone in his fingers is beginning to feel more and more like the barrel of a gun pressed against his temple.

He didn't realize a chat on the phone with Zuko could take the turn it did.

"Am I courteous to you in your dreams, Prince Zuko?"

This time, the pause that follows is abrupt yet sharp. Sokka wonders if there's a limit to Zuko's patience and whether he'd long ago crossed it.

The words he'd spat at him only a few nights ago return to Sokka, and he doesn't like the way they make him feel.

" _You lack manners on every occasion, if that's what you're asking."_

"Haven't I told you before? You have to learn to tolerate my vices if you want to work for me."

Zuko's tone of voice is a northern wind in Sokka's ear.

" _I don't work for you."_

"Yeah, yeah, believe what you want—"

" _I don't think you understand the way this works, Sokka. I want terms to this arrangement. I want rules and lines you won't cross."_

Sokka's laugh dies in his throat. Something about the way the prince is speaking reminds him of the Emperor, the man he'd seen so many times on the screen of his television. The voice follows him no matter where he goes, blooming like weeds from radios in cafes or glaring at him down in the underground.

Sokka cannot forget, not even for a second, whose son Zuko is. 

What Zuko is capable of.

"Hostages don't make demands, and you're exactly that. Nobody I know will welcome you with open arms once I—" he stops himself, catching a short breath, "I still don't know if you're even going to be allowed in, and you're already drawing _lines_? This is bigger than your fucking demands, Zuko. Maybe this worked differently for you back where you came from, but here, you make no rules."

"Pardon—?"

"And you fucking _listen to me,_ " Sokka growls. The way the prince can get to him even through the lines of a fucking _burner phone_ irritates him more than anything else. "You shut up when Nox tells you to shut up. You go where we tell you to go. You have no title protecting you when you're among us." 

It seems that whenever they meet, a collision is inevitable, and Sokka wonders if one day his hostility will blow up in his face. But he cannot let this go, not yet.

" _Is this how you speak to everyone around you? Because if that is the case, it truly baffles me that your sister came to your rescue. People here should really be taught to hold their tongue."_

Sokka inhales to respond with an even angrier tirade, but Zuko isn't done speaking.

" _Are you going to tell me to shut up? If I were you, I'd be more careful around me, Sokka. Especially if I were you."_

"F—"

" _I can't meet tomorrow. I have something to take care of. But after tomorrow, at the same place — to which you didn't show up — at the same time. I'll be waiting."_

The line goes dead before Sokka can bark out a response, something biting and venomous, and he feels the need to kick something, to throw the burner phone into the snow at his feet and heel it until it shatters.

He wants to do something similar to Zuko's face.

Instead, he stuffs the phone back into his pocket, cursing under his breath, and hurries back inside.

Whatever amiability he felt towards Zuko after he'd rescued him from his cell dissipates into thin air like the warm puffs of his breath.

His dreams are violent and full of gore that night, no matter how much he tries to stifle his rapid breathing with the pillow once the dull glow of a morning awakens him. 

ZUKO

The phone is heavy in Zuko's clenched fingers as he presses the red button so deep he thinks it might snap.

_And you fucking listen to me._

_You have no title protecting you when you're among us._

The phone is thrown across the coverlets of his bedsheets, skittering towards the edge. A part of Zuko hopes it smashes.

It doesn't, and the anticlimactic outburst leaves him emptied and full of rage all at once. He wishes for his sister, for once in his life. He wishes Azula were here to block his blows in another practice match of theirs, to urge him to hit harder, sharper, crueler. He wishes she'd be here to justify a release of his anger.

Nobody, however, is in his bedroom apart from the ghosts of a nation he does not want to belong to. 

He remembers Sokka, helpless on the floor of the cell, and the sick pleasure of seeing him this way. It was an advantage, a privilege, to witness him this vulnerable, and Zuko locks it for a blacker day. For now, he places the expression of the boy on his knees over the words Sokka had spat out moments ago.

_The thing is,_ he's partially right. It was Zuko who had offered to help in the first place, a reckless and illogical decision fueled by years of abuse and belittlement, and now he reaps what he has sown, no matter how many times he'd pricked his finger over the needle. It's his fault if he is discovered. It's his fault of Nox doesn't accept him.

He had never really thought he'd need to prove himself to anyone outside of Ogni, having his title and the golden adornments in his hair speak for themselves, but here, they are as much of a brand of treachery as the scar over his face.

In two long strides, he approaches the window and throws back the heavily embroidered curtains to peer outside, but he cannot see anything past the faint glow of the lamplights. There is no moon, there are no stars in the blackness of Morye's sky.

But stars belong in the dark, and so does the memory of Sokka's lips under the tips of his fingers.

_Am I courteous to you in your dreams, Prince Zuko?_

"Yeah, like hell," Zuko mutters into the darkness, drawing the curtains back together. He loathes the way Sokka's words get under his skin.

The morye-born is not courteous in Zuko's dreams that night, not by a long shot.

The third white shirt he'd thrown across the suite joins the heap in the corner, and Zuko stares hard into his reflection, picking apart the slicked back ponytail, the rings on his fingers, the single earring gleaming near the base of his jaw.

Groaning, he falls across the blue sheets, resting there for a few seconds before getting up and walking once again across towards the mahogany wardrobe full of red robes and white shirts.

No amount of rings can obscure the rims of his eyes, blue with insomnia, the sharpness of his hollowed cheekbones, and he loathes the consequences of his rash decisions. will realize, Zuko thinks. He will know something is wrong.

_Why_ did he have to give in to the pleas of his weakened subconscious and send that damned letter?

A knock on the door startles him out of his stupor, and Zuko scrambles for a shirt to throw over his torso before opening it and glaring at Eska.

"What?"

His words are sharper than intended, but anxiety is eating him alive, and honestly, Zuko's social skills cease to exist once it comes to nervousness, a trait he, as a royal, should have weeded out in childhood. A trait that is one of his many vices and wrongdoings.

A trait that may betray him if the prince is not careful.

"Yes?" He asks, softer this time, removing the frown from his brow and straightening his shoulders. Eska's eyes, however, land on the interior of his bedroom, trousers and heaps of jewels on the floor like a treasury, and the man's eyebrows creep up his forehead.

"I was asked to inform you that General Iroh is to arrive in a few minutes, and that the suite on the floor below is being prepared for his stay," Eska rattles away, eyes still inspecting the mess that is Zuko's own suite. "Your Highness, if you'd like for a cleaner to be sent up—"

Without a response, Zuko closes the door in his face and whirls around. " _I don't want a cleaner!"_ He barks at the door, belatedly, and resumes his helpless search for a anything that doesn't scream— what? That he's a traitor?

It feels as though the mold he'd crafted for himself for years no longer fits, and it is terrifying, it is an abyss beneath his feet.

He is afraid, most of all. Unce Iroh is nothing if not perceptive. His fingers itch to begin another baking spree, but ever since the events related to his recent attempt at cooking, an aversion creeps up in his mind, and besides, Uncle would know something is wrong, because Zuko bakes when he's stressed, and he's _really_ fucking stressed.

The sound of a car outside the cracked open panoramic window of his bedroom almost gives Zuko a heart attack, and the prince runs up to the pile of abandoned shirts on the floor, rummaging through it before abandoning it in favor of the remaining black silk blouse, still on a hanger. The silk is cold over his skin, but it clears his mind, and the necklace with the royal insignia that is layered over its collar grounds Zuko with its weight.

Still, Zuko is not prepared for the face he sees centimeters away from his as he swings open the door and faces Ogni's most prized war general, a man with soft grey hair and softer eyes he saves only for his nephew.

Something in his facade cracks as Zuko is pulled into a familiar hug, and he fights the urge to bury his nose in the crook of his uncle's shoulder and, as embarrassing as it may seem, cry.

Instead, the prince pulls away sharply, blinking away any trace of weakness, but he feels momentarily destabilized. 

It seemed, for a moment, that the weight of his royal adornments lightens momentarily to be just that — the weight of gold, and he is not the prince of a viciously demagogic nation, but a child in the arms of his guardian, and there is no Nox, and there is no threat, and there is no whip in his father's hands.

And there is no scar on Zuko's face, only freckles.

"How was your trip? I apologize for forcing you to come here at such short notice," Zuko says, letting Iroh into his bedroom, and praying that the man won't peer underneath the bed to discover the discarded pieces of his entire wardrobe stuffed into the narrow space between the wood and the floor.

The door closes behind them with a decisive click, and his uncle turns around, eyes assessing. This time, however, there is a tightness to the set of his mouth Zuko doesn't necessarily recognize or like.  
  


"You've lost weight again," Uncle says, more of a statement than a question. Zuko blinks rapidly. The softness of his voice doesn't match the sharpness of his gaze, and the prince feels his heart sinking.

"I have been busy with preparing for father's arrival—"

Uncle Iroh shakes his head solemnly.

"You know your excuses don't work with me, Zuko. Your letter spoke for itself. Has your medicine not been working as well? You haven't tried increasing the dosage, have you?" The general approaches him again as though to get a better look, and Zuko's once again as exposed as though he is staring into his own reflection.

Zuko jolts away from him suddenly, cursing himself for ever telling Uncle anything was ever fucking wrong. 

"I'm _fine_!" He cuts off. "That letter was a moment of weakness. And my medicine's working fine, and the dosages are just fine. I was just tired that day, and angry, okay?"

"I told Ozai this was a bad idea, leaving you alone like that. You should've just accepted my offer and had me come with you from the beginning."

"I—"

Something softens in the man's eyes.

"I missed you too, Zuko." Iroh smiles, but it's a somewhat dejected expression, and Zuko wishes he'd be alone again, alone with his thoughts and his own problems and his own nightmares. Having someone see the state of his compulsive vulnerability floods the prince with something akin to rage. "And I am glad you wrote to me when you did. Whatever is on your mind, we can talk it over a cup of good tea. Have you found any places in Morye to your liking?"

Zuko, still deep in thought, imagines what his uncle would say to an excursion of Morye, but with the addition of a snowed-over crippling cabin, an abandoned bunker and a patrol detainment station.

"No," he says simply, eyes on the blue carpet.

His uncle nods, satisfied. "This is perfect. I have been to Morye before, if you did not know, and I visited a place here, a café that brewed a deliciously aromatic blend of oolong and lotus leaf tea, and one of the best green teas I have ever tasted, truly—"

"Okay, okay," Zuko gives in. "But it'll have to be a royal visit, yes? You have to alert the guards beforehand." Finally, he raises his gaze to meet Iroh's. "Morye is not like I imagined it would be."

"How come?"

Zuko strolls over to the wardrobe to retrieve his black coat.

"The people," he says.

"What about them?"

"They're..." he lapses into silence, hand on the doorknob. Everything Sokka had ever said to him rushes into his memory like the flow of a scalding stream, from the night they'd met outside his apartment to the scene in Zuko's bedroom, and his fingers tighten around the silver sphere. "Impertinent." He twists it. "Rude."

Sokka's hands around his throat. Sokka's fingers gripping his shoulder. Sokka's weight on top of him, locking him in.

"Indecent."

He doesn't look back on his way out of the suite, eyes intent on the walls of the corridor, images playing in his mind, impossible to erase. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guess what café Uncle Iroh used to visit a lot in Morye? ;) 
> 
> Anyways, comment what you think! And stay safe, lovelies.


	13. questions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hope you’ve all been safe! Please answer in the comments! <3

hi everyone!   
This isn’t an update (obviously) but I was simply wondering if any of you are still reading this and would like to read the next chapter & for the book to keep uploading?   
I’m sorry I haven’t written in two months or so, it’s been and while and it’s been a lot. I hope you’ve all been safe.   
Anyways, me if you’re interested! I’m writing this for you either way.  
Love you!


	14. coup d’etat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They stand there, a few beats too long to be a simple pause in movement, and Sokka's fingers pick up the rapid beating of the prince's heart, just as they did a few nights ago. Zuko has no cause to be afraid, and his pulse speaks of a different emotion altogether, too erratic to be fear.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Omg omg omg omg HIIII I’ve missed writing so much!! This particular chapter has been sitting unedited in my drafts for about a month now and thanks to all of your wonderful comments I finally got the motivation to edit and post it! And now I’m kind of obsessed with writing again? Oops  
> Anyways I hope you like this and I love you so so so much I missed you all UGH  
> See you in the next chapter (hopefully next week or even earlier!)

_Quick recap since it’s been a while:_

_sokka tried to kind of kill zuko but thought better of it cause he’s kinda cute and besides later he helped him get released from being detained and did I mention he’s kinda cute?? anyways our boy little dumpling wants to be into nox now with all the cool kids and overthrow his daddy but for that he needs sokka to trust him which is difficult since they’re both insufferable and no I will not elaborate_

**XIV**

  
  
**SOKKA**

The guards enter one by one, though not donning the traditional patrolmen uniform, an interchangeable concoction of red and black leather.

Their embroidered overcoats and golden toggles hiss of a rank higher, and it's unfathomable to Sokka why they've decided to fling open the door of the Jasmine Dragon and seat themselves throughout the corners and near the walls of the cafè, in between customers with varying expressions of alarm.

They look familiar somehow, still. He had seen this golden gleam of the details of their soft-knitted armor before, lying on his back in the snow. _The royal guard,_ Sokka thinks, and his blood freezes cold despite the warmth of the café.

The last of the guards finally ambles through the door, hand presumably where one of his guns is hidden, and declares a string of phrases that almost give Sokka a heart attack.

"This establishment is hereby receiving the gift of a royal visit by His Highness Prince Zuko of the Ogni Nation and The Great General Iroh, referred to by many as Dragon of the West. Please stay seated as you are searched. It is forbidden to take photos or use electronics in the presence of The Prince and The General."

With a bow, the guard walks up the café and towards Sokka.

A few thoughts rush through his mind, none of them exactly coherent, but something about Zuko's tone last night makes Sokka believe that perhaps this is a form of revenge, and the Prince is finally done with Sokka's teasing.

None of this makes sense, not when Zuko had told him that they'd be meeting the day after, without the intention of seeking Sokka out himself. Not when both of them had gotten the explicit message that the other had little interest in meeting at all.

The tray Sokka's been holding almost slips out of his grasp as the Prince steps through the doorway of their cafe, the dull blue hue outside outlining him like it had done so many times before for Sokka. Here, he can see the ravine between them in full clarity — Sokka, the waiter at a café shop, and Zuko. _His Highness._

Having him as an enemy is already a twisted privilege.

Even though the prince is dressed in finery and bathed in jewels and gold, Sokka remembers the feel of his bare shoulders. It is all he can think about as Cyn pushes him forward, forgetting — or neglecting — to realize that Sokka's holding a tray full of fucking _teacups_ , of all things.

And of course — because Sokka can never catch a break and probably never will, at least not until he ends up dead in a ditch somewhere — his feet twist together like strings of fate and he loses his balance only a few centimeters away from Zuko, porcelain the shade of Zuko's pale face crashing to the ground.

It's not that the guards jumping up from seats all around him tip him off, a memory he wants to erase, a pain in the area of his abdomen everlasting.

It's that, without a spare thought, instead of catching Sokka's— anything, really; his hand, the sleeves of his blue sweater — instead of even attempting to save him from falling to the ground, Zuko takes a step back.

Once again, Sokka is on the floor, sneering up at the prince.

It is as if the snow outside had stopped falling; as though the time on his watch has halted. There's tea seeping into the fabric of his jeans and through the cracks in the floorboards (distantly, he wonders if it could reach the tunnels underneath The Jasmine Dragon). There's the prince, face gone so white that the shade of his lips against skin is a stark cherry-stained hue. 

There's Sokka and the six words he'd had on his tongue ever since he saw Zuko — _are you here to betray us?_

A shadow falls over the two of them, and, just as Sokka is about to rise from the ground, he feels his knees buckle beneath him. The face of General Iroh, a face he'd seen on so many gazettes and book covers, a face he'd had no reason to hate but hated still — looms behind Zuko, a serene smile out of all things stretching its fine lines.

The aged man speaks, and the stillness is shattered.

"My, look at all that spilled tea." His somewhat soothing voice rises as the man turns to his right. "Stand down, gentlemen," he tells the guards, who obey, however unwillingly. 

Sokka wants to shout, to punch Zuko in the face, to hide Aang and himself, to run away. Like a fucking coward. _Please_ , he begs the skies. _Let me be a coward just this once._

It's too much — seeing the enemy this close, on Nox's territory, standing above its tunnels with Nox's radios and Nox's comrades and Nox's assassins. He hates being unsure of whether to shoot first or to hide, he hates the fact that he had entrusted something as precious as Aang's life into Zuko's unstable hands.

And the prince _is_ unstable — as Sokka finally rises to his feet, he spares a look at him, his eyes on the floor —he looks like Sokka feels. There's barely anything left to the glowing, peachy facade the prince had brought with him to Morye’s port some time ago on his polished white speedboat.

_He looks_ , Sokka thinks, with a sneer, _like one of Morye._ Just as exhausted, the same haunted look to his otherwise perfect face, omitting the scar.

Lost in thought, Sokka is pushed back just as suddenly — hands grabbing him by the collar and dragging him away, and Cyn steps forward, head bowed, voice emotionless. He can only watch as Katara holds him back, probably just as confused at the scene unraveling before them.

"Your Highness. Your,—" Cyn stammers, turning away from Zuko, whose eyes are still on the floor, rising his gaze up at General Iroh, "—Your Greatness... we haven't been expecting a visit from you anytime soon. Please excuse us as we prepare a table for you and clean up the mess one of our employees made, it wasn't at all deliberate, Sir."

The General's laugh doesn't sound forced, but it is strange. It is too light for Morye. Sokka can only guess the rapid explosion in popularity The Dragon is going to experience after this even stranger royal visit. (That is, if this isn't a detainment mission and he isn't going to be ordered to be shot right here.)

"No need to make a fuss. The table by that window appears perfectly prepared to me." The General gestures over to Katara's favorite round table she sits at sometimes, when the cafe finally closes for the day and Sokka is left to finish up cleaning and putting away pastries.

Cyn, rushing to appease, to please — Sokka cannot believe he'd called the prince little dumpling and badmouthed the Fire Nation in the same room a few weeks ago — guides the pair over, and Sokka can see the confusion written in all of his movements.

"Why are they here?" Katara whispers into his ear, and Sokka shrugs his shoulders.

"I don’t know. I don't know anything," he hisses back, and hates it. One of Nox had already rushed into the back rooms, alarming the rest of them of the sudden visit, and Sokka can only hope it hasn't caused an even greater ruckus than the one in his head.

"Well, you better find out. I don't like this visit one bit. Why is the Dragon of the West in _Morye_? This wasn't in the plan. Oh, Sokka, this wasn't in our plans at _all_ —"

"Can you _shut up?_ " Sokka bites back harshly, surveying the guards at the tables. All around him, the customers have eyes the size of saucers, teas and coffees forgotten in favor of the two elegantly dressed men seating themselves at a window table, Cyn placing menus onto its polished surface.

Instead of responding, Katara slaps a notepad and a pen into Sokka's palm. "Go," she says.

" _What_? Me? Are you fucking—"

Cyn, rushing back, gives Sokka a look so intense that he has no other option but to obey.

"You'll pay for this," he hisses at the two of them, eyes on the General and the Prince. 

It's the first time he'd allowed himself to truly look at Zuko.  
Gold spreads over the tight knot of the prince's hair, gold on his neck and his fingers. So much gold, and yet, there's something metal about his rigid posture. Sokka cannot believe he's seeing him like this. In his café. In a shirt of black satin, just like his hair.

He begins walking.

The thoughts invading his head are unbidden, but he welcomes them anyway. He remembers what if felt like to have the prince under him. 

He wants to remember.

"Welcome to the Jasmine Dragon," Sokka greets them, voice hoarse. He's in front of their table now, and Zuko still isn't looking at him. ( _What if he's guilty for having ratted me out? He better fucking not be,_ Sokka thinks,). General Iroh, on the other hand, twinkles as though the tension in the room cannot be cut with a butter knife. "Are you ready to order anything to drink as you choose your meals?"

"I've had this place recommended to me by so many. Your Oolong is said to be particularly fine," the General says, as though he isn't a chess piece of Ogni's closest royalty. As though he hasn't played his part in destroying Sokka's home.

Sokka barely remembers to acknowledge the man's words. He'd almost decided to fuck it and threaten the pair with the knife strapped to his thigh before any of them can do the presumed same to him when Zuko speaks.

"Coffee. Caramel and gingerbread syrup, whip cream separately, regular cream separately, too." The words are said without as much as a glance is Sokka's direction, and he's unsure of whether he should be offended or grateful.

If this isn't anything but a royal visit to a cafe, however, Sokka cannot do anything but play his role.

"We don't serve gingerbread syrup here, your Highness," he says, and hopes Zuko hears the underlying threat in his otherwise toneless voice. _You better not be coming here as a traitor._

What kind of co-oppositionist relationship is this when Sokka can't even trust Zuko not to rat them out? Will it always be this — having to bite back his tongue, having to obey? Zuko can turn the tables as swiftly as he desires, but Sokka will be the one at the other end of his gun if he suddenly decides to switch sides.

_Am I courteous to you in your dreams?_

"This much caffeine, nephew?" Iroh mutters to Zuko. "Have some tea instead. Herbal tea is great for your inso—"

"Just the caramel syrup, then." Zuko's tone is flat, and Sokka marvels at the mastery behind his act. If anything, it seems as though the prince has truly never had him climb through his window and threaten to slit his royal throat on multiple occasions. It seems as though they're strangers.

All the words he'd said to Zuko last night come rushing back to him like an adrenaline injection.

"I want your chocolate cake with extra whipping cream and chocolate drizzle," Zuko continues, and Sokka rushes to jot it down. Something about this is so fucking wrong, yet he cannot, for the life of him, put his finger on it.

"Zuko, wouldn't you like a yogurt parfait instead? I'm sure this gentleman here can get it for you. This much sugar—"

"Another word and you'll be having your tea alone," Zuko growls lowly, eyes on the menu. 

Sokka wants to ask him so many questions.

Fuck that. Sokka needs his questions answered, and he needs them so as soon as possible. 

"Well, I _would_ like the yogurt parfait. And water for the two of us, if you will. Do you, by any chance, have peach jam as a substitute for the strawberry?"

The Dragon of the West is asking Sokka for peach jam with his parfait, and Sokka doesn't know what to fucking think.

He doesn't know what to think as he mutters something in response, closing his notepad and backtracking into the kitchens, hands trembling only slightly. He doesn't know what to say as he places the notepad next to Toph, who's sitting on a stool somewhere in the corner, elbow-deep into a jar of freshly baked cookies. He doesn't know what to respond as Katara and Mai rush up to him, eager to hear what he has to tell them.

He doesn't know much, and yet, shaking his head, he tells them that it will be fine. He will fix this. He will get Zuko to tell him what the hell is going on.

Without giving it much second thought, he grabs a nearby tray, placing two perfectly clean glasses onto it, pouring water into them methodically, until it reaches their rims. Until it is almost overflowing. Then, just as methodically, he enters the table area once again, too focused on his task to note the look on Zuko's pale face as he approaches the table.

"Your water, your Highness," Sokka says, and, without further pause, after placing one of the glasses onto the polished wood of the table, flips the tray so violently that the remaining glass flies onto the prince's lap, water soaking the front of his shirt and pants within seconds.

Time stops once again. Silk clings to Zuko's rapidly rising chest as though it has been molded for him, rivulets running down onto the floor. For the first time that day, he gazes at Sokka as though seeing him for the first time, face wholly unguarded.

Several things happen at once.

With a terrifying concoction of clashing, guards leap to their feet, safety catches clicking, barrels pointed at whomever has dared to threaten the prince's state. The General gasps, amusement mixed with alarm, as though seeing Zuko caught off guard is somewhat a delight.

But Zuko jolts to his feet, too, eyes leaving Sokka, though widened in shock, still.

" _Stand down!_ " He barks, an order worthy of a prince, as the patrolmen freeze in place.

Sokka takes it as his cue to interject.

"Your Highness, I am _terribly_ sorry," he rushes out, voice full of feigned remorse, too real to be considered a mockery, unless it's Zuko. Zuko knows. Zuko can tell, "Let me help you. My deepest apologies—"

Without giving Zuko a chance to respond, Sokka grabs his wrist — since when has the prince's wrist become so feverish to the touch? — and drags him in the direction of the bathrooms. Distracted, confused and probably ready to strangle Sokka, Zuko holds up his other hand to tell the guards to keep their place, and, to Sokka's surprise, lets him lead the way.

He can feel the prince's pulse underneath his fingertips. Something about silks and satins exposes Zuko's skin instead of concealing it. Something about Zuko's skin, in effect, is incredibly distracting.

Sokka flings the bathroom door open, pulling the prince inside and locking it it within seconds. Then, in a movement that is now almost familiar, his hands find Zuko's shoulders and push him against the door, one fist grabbing his collar and the other placed firmly against his collarbone.

"What the fuck, Zuko?" Sokka hisses, ignoring the way his own pulse speeds up at their proximity. It hasn't even been— _fuck_ it, he doesn't know how long it's been— but having Zuko be this close is either a parallel to one of his dreams or reality, the two far too intertwined to try and untangle.

He cannot tell whether it is anger that pushes his voice to come out all wrong. He doesn't know why he cannot seem to look into the prince's eyes.

_I've finally lost it,_ Sokka thinks, and barely manages to suppress a psychotic giggle.

Instead of responding, Zuko and his hands — surprisingly firm — find Sokka's, shoving the boy away with such force that he stumbles backwards.

"Don't fucking _touch_ me," the Ogni prince sneers. "I didn't know uncle was going to choose this place out of them all for his stupid visit. Do you think I really know where you work?”

" _You_ —" Sokka finally recovers from the shove, crossing his arms over his chest. But there are so many things he wants to say, too many. “You could have warned me. You could’ve said something about the General coming to Morye. _Fuck_ ,” he pinches the bridge of his nose, unable to see Zuko like this — still pressed to the wall, silk shirt soaked with Morye water, in his fucking café, mouth parted defensively—“Are you even fucking _trying_?”

“ _None_ of this is my fault!” Zuko growls. “You think _you’re_ the only paranoiac here? I can’t fucking sleep, Sokka, knowing what I know now—“

“Shut up.”

The prince blinks several times, as though the dimmed lights of the bathroom have fogged up his vision. 

“Pardon?”

Fingers still pinching the bridge of his nose, Sokka sighs. His eyes close as though on cue. “We’re not getting anywhere like this. We just keep accusing each other. _You_ can’t sleep?” He finally gathers enough strength to open his eyes, boring them into Zuko’s. “I haven’t slept in three fucking years. Got it?”

Instead of responding, the prince looks at Sokka. He’s different like this, different to the boy who stepped back instead of helping Sokka up. He’s different to the boy who slept as Sokka climbed through the window with a knife in his hand.

There’s something imperial about him now, as though he’s looking at one of his subjects. As though he’s scheming.

“Discussing our sleep schedules cannot be the reason you’ve brought me here, am I right?”

Something enters the room, a tension Sokka cannot rebel against. A fever he cannot cool. He finds himself paralyzed under the prince’s gaze, practiced so many times in throne rooms and panoramic halls filled with royalty.

“Well? I’ve told you that this isn’t my fault. I think this is where you apologize for ruining my shirt.” 

Zuko looks down at him, something akin to hunger in his eyes, although it could just as well be a wicked trick of the light. It could be a hunger for anything.

Anyone.

Sokka opens his mouth, but he cannot trust himself to speak. If he dares, his apology might be replaced by words far more explicit.

Zuko sighs.

"Aren't you at least going to help me clean up the mess you’ve made?"

Sokka's about to bite back a response, but the light is playing tricks again, and he can't look away from the ambers glowing on Zuko's face. He can't look away even as he backs towards the stack of rolled hand towels in a woven basket near one of the sinks.

He can't look away even as he nears Zuko, again, noticing how rigid the prince in front of him goes, how still.

He wants to ask Zuko if he regrets his arrogant request. He wants the prince to know that this is a line Sokka is ready to haughtily cross. 

Instead, he finally breaks their gaze, and the two boys look down at the towel in his hand. The room is quiet, and it's possible to hear the hitch in Zuko's breathing as Sokka places a decisive hand on the water stain on Zuko's black satin shirt. 

It has escalated fast, this fever.

They stand there, a few beats too long to be a simple pause in movement, and Sokka's fingers pick up the rapid beating of the prince's heart, just as they did a few nights ago. Zuko has no cause to be afraid, and his pulse speaks of a different emotion altogether, too erratic to be fear.

There’s a flush high on Zuko’s cheeks, feverish, — everything is a fever with him — and Sokka remembers, to his demise, some of the boys he’d seen blush this way when he’d gotten close enough. None of them had pupils blown this wide, though, a loathing this prominent in their eyes.

It seems so long ago that Zuko’s fingers had brushed Sokka’s lips, and yet he remembers it as vividly as he does the process of loading a gun.

“I’ve apologized enough,” Sokka whispers, and their faces are so close, so very close. 

Something twists inside him, a longing.

Zuko clicks his tongue. “You’re supposed to add “ _Your Highness_ ” whenever you address me.”

“That would be too courteous of someone who lacks manners on every occasion, don’t you think?” Sokka cocks his head to the side, but something about Zuko’s tone puts him on edge. The prince cannot let him forget that he is, indeed, royalty.

Not like Sokka needs a reminder.

His words surprise an abrupt laugh out of the boy pressed against the door. “Don’t make me repeat myself. I want to be addressed properly.” Before Sokka can come up with a witty response, he continues, “you can let go of the towel now.”

This Zuko — so confident — is a strange novelty. Has the prince seen Sokka on his knees too much to consider him a force to resonate with?

For some reason, Sokka cannot find it within himself to disobey. It terrifies him — the power of his nonchalance. Of his orders.

He steps back, towel forgotten in his hand. With a swift movement, Zuko unlatches the lock of the door. Sokka doesn’t register that the prince’s fingers are shaking violently.

“I expect my cake with lots of whipped cream, for your information.” Zuko turns his back towards Sokka, and there’s something — he’s seen this somewhere before, but where? This regal set to someone else’s shoulders, a faceless personage, too strange to forget.

But this is a thought for later. Sokka locks it away along with Zuko’s rapid pulse under his skin.

“And sprinkle caramelized pecans on top. As compensation for my shirt.”

Zuko leaves the bathroom, and Sokka, for the first time in half an hour, exhales a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.

_You are going to be difficult to control,_ he thinks _. Your Highness._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comment what you think ILY ILY ILY <3333


	15. i fear no evil; the shadows are mine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "What did you just say?" Sokka breathes out, too low for the prince to hear.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i wasn’t going to post this early but this book is slowly becoming an obsession
> 
> TRIGGER WARNING: mentions of suicide, weapons, death, blood, the usual  
> In this chapter, Sokka contemplates death as a way out; this, however, is never the case. If you have ever had suicidal thoughts or are stressed/depressed/just sad, first of all, I am here for you if you ever want to talk to someone: my tumblr is xeniya :)  
> Secondly, please refrain from reading this chapter if you can.  
> National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255  
> Love you and I hope you’re all well!!

**CHAPTER XV**

**SOKKA**

The mirror of the now abandoned bathroom stares back at Sokka. No dimness can obscure the weapon that is his gaze, yet he stays in the shadows, still like the barrel of one.

He stays in the shadows until his hands halt the urge to snap something. Until his mind stops racing. Until he believes that he can carry the order out to the pair of traitors to his own state — one of them certainly as suspicious as traitors get — without smearing the whipped cream all over Zuko's face.

He misses the prince being outright loyal to the Emperor. He misses the blind admiration Zuko had for his father and for his nation. Sokka is no stranger to emotional turmoil — he can see, with a strange clarity, as though his reflection is not his own but someone else's, — that Zuko is standing too close to something Sokka cannot name.

Too close to something he does not want to name.

It was all so much simpler when he knew where they stood. It was so much easier to antagonize Zuko than to try and understand him, and, what's worse, trust him.

_He doesn't have time for that_ , he thinks. _Aang_ — Aang is hiding somewhere in Morye, which now has one more lap dog dancing to the Emperor's flute, not counting the dozens of royal guards that now flood the town. _What a fucking mess._

"What a fucking mess," the mirror tells him, and Sokka wants to shatter the person he'd become.

He almost trips over Toph on the way back, eyes unseeing. Katara, in the kitchens — he hates it that on one of her days off she's helping him make money instead of relaxing somewhere nice with a nice book and nice people, not Sokka, not assassins swarming in a shitty cafe in a shitty town — had already plated the parfait and the cake.

"Can you carry it over?" Sokka asks her without much hope.

_Aren't you going to help me clean up the mess you've made?_

The prince had never before been this daring. The prince had never before looked at Sokka like that.

If he faces Zuko again this soon—

"Not a chance."

Sokka looks back down at the piece of chocolate cake as though it had personally wronged him. “Don't we have pecans to top this off, or anything like that?"

Katara laughs, something debased and debasing in the abrupt sound.

"Just bring them their food and get it over with." Then, under her nose, watching Sokka leave—"I still can't believe that scum—"

The door behind Sokka makes her jolt up in panic.

The dining room of the cafè itself is filled with low talk and the clinking of forks, and Sokka's footsteps are too loud, too telling. _I am walking over tunnels that have planned the usurpation of your Emperor,_ he wants to tell The Dragon of the West. _Here's your parfait with apricot jam._

He'd worried for nothing, however; the prince's face is demonstratively turned towards the window as he approaches — no matter that all he can see are the armed backs of the royal guard lined up outside. If Sokka looks through them, he's pretty sure he'll see drawn curtains and locked doors. He'll see his people holed in their own homes.

If he clatters the cutlery too loudly as he sets it down, the only giveaway is the tensing of Zuko's muscles underneath the satin of his still damp shirt. 

If Zuko hadn’t turned out to be this unhinged, Sokka would have fallen for the prince's looks like the rest of them. The scarred side of Zuko’s face— there's art in revenge, when it is performed like this. When agony is permanently crystallized in something as everlasting as his scar. 

The thought is so sudden that Sokka almost spills the coffee and it's syruped contents onto the prince, this time for real. Startled, he sets it down quickly, lowering his eyes.

Shame, unbidden and untimely, floods his cheeks with a flush he wishes he could hide.

"Careful, young man," The General interjects softly, his eyes following Sokka's every motion, _like a fucking hawk_ , "this is no water."

To this, Zuko peels his eyes off of the window and raises his eyebrows at the plate in front of him. Sokka straightens back up. This, for some reason, is far more humiliating than the memory of drying Zuko’s shirt. In fact, the memory forces Sokka to look away. There are strands of black silk that have escaped from the golden ornament atop the prince’s head, and it makes him seem younger than he is, _softer_ than he is 

"I asked for caramelized pecans _and_ whipped cream, not pecans _or_ whipped cream."

Sokka bows his head and hopes with all his might that Zuko catches the taunt in his next words.

"Your Highness, Morye does not possess the wealth necessary to grant your wish."

The prince scoffs, rolling his eyes. "And yet you have the— ah, what was the name?— the _Emperor's hands_ hanging on your trees?"

Sokka's about to respond when a sudden thought stops him dead in his tracks. His expression must be grave enough for Zuko to realize his mistake — the prince goes even paler than he already is, eyes darting to the side.

" _What did you just say_?" Sokka breathes out, too low for the prince to hear. Then, as though jolted back from a trance, bows back down and, stuttering out something about the two enjoying their meal, walks back to the kitchens. 

A realization unravels itself within Sokka, a thought so clear that he marvels at how stupid he must have been to not have pieced it together.

_Sunglasses but no gloves_? He’d asked once, shaking the hand of a stranger. _Zuko's_ hands have always been bare.

Everything clicks into place. The strange accent. The glasses. The defensiveness, the inclination to spend money on trinkets as though he possesses no knowledge of scarcity—

The man at the market was no one else but— Zee was no one else but—

He'd told the stranger his name, he'd introduced him to one of his grandmothers friends — why the _fuck_ was _Zuko_ at a market with a scarf wrapped around his face?

_Heavens_ , he thinks. What else had he spilled to the prince? How much had Zuko seen of Morye that he should never have? 

Tomorrow's meeting is looming over him, _Zuko_ is looming over him, consuming his thoughts, and Sokka can do nothing about it but lock the questions he has for the royal away until he can tweeze them out of him. He loathes and craves it, Sokka realizes. He wants Zuko to come clean.

Sokka doesn't return out until the General and the prince leave, taking the tension and the clicking of guns and the reminder that Morye is not it's own but a tyrant's with them. By then, a faint chatter has returned to the room, faces growing more animated by the minute, and people begin spilling into the Jasmine Dragon, eager to hear the news.

The cake is left untouched by the prince, the whip cream melted on the side.

"That little bitch," Sokka mutters, grabbing the plate. He almost misses the stack of crown notes piled next to it. Eyes widening, fingers skimming, he counts them.

_Two hundred notes_. A tip for a bill not even worth twenty crowns.

Truly, he knows not what to think. He promises himself, firmly, that money is the last thing he wants in return.

Tomorrow. He’ll shove it back into Zuko’s bare hands.

Even with the amount of time he’d spent bowing down to the prince, the compensation Sokka wants is nothing Zuko can willingly give.

Shoving the money into his pocket, he almost misses the piece of tissue underneath the stack, folded neatly into two. His eyes dart around the restaurant, hand outstretched. _Interesting_. 

Sokka flips it open, and his blood runs cold.

The phone in his hands is a hand grenade. Sokka's fingers skim over the numbers until he has memorized the digits to Zuko's phone like the coordinates to a treasure hidden far away.

_How much do you know_? He wants to ask. He wants the prince to be unable to run away. He wants the prince to confess. He wants his hands on Zuko's throat, again.

Frustrated, Sokka throws it across the room, something he'd wanted to do ever since Zuko had hung up on him. With a soft thud, the burner lands on the carpet.

He closes his eyes, the prospect of violence eclipsing everything else. Before that, it has been Suki that has kept him sane, memories of her, the press of her lips against his, the soft pauses in her gasps.

Suki betrayed his trust. There's nothing else.

He takes out the napkin again, fingers running over the code.

_21N T LTS WHT_

Twenty-one at night. At The White Lotus.

The thing is, Zuko couldn't have known the Nox code, and Sokka won't call him to ask. He'd had enough encounters with the prince to last him the night. This invitation — and it is one, in the most traditional, basic style Nox has to offer — could easily be a trap, but Sokka's curiosity is an addiction, he — the addict.

The White Lotus. If Zuko had somehow found out a way to read and write in codes phrases, the location is a giveaway of his inexperience. The White Lotus is true to its name — the whitest skin of those highest in Morye, the purest status. The cleanest reputation. A restaurant for the rich. A club fit for murderers and thieves, for royalty.

And if it's someone else — The White Lotus is as good of a place to carry out an arrest as any. Sokka, however, has grown too accustomed to the feeling of being persecuted, hunted.

He craves it now, stupidly.

He knows, even as he is strapping the gun to his waist, slipping knives into his boots, his hidden pockets and his sleeves, that he is going to be there, whoever it is. Today's visit had used up all of his panic, all of his fear. The General's presence alone has been able to unbalance the carefully composed stance he'd been holding for so long.

The invitation is strange, but he is willing to accept it. Something in his gut pleads him to.

There is nothing to fear, not tonight. 

There's always a way out — if Sokka is caught, he'd practiced placing the barrel of the gun into his mouth too many times to be afraid of shootings himself. A quick death is better than torture. A quick death will give his people a chance. A quick death will shut him up. 

He doesn't want to enjoy the thrill these thoughts give him.

  
  


His tattered watch reads eight fifty-nine, and Sokka, standing in front of the opulently erected pantheon that is the White Lotus, ponders that perhaps he hadn't thought this through.

It's not that it was difficult slipping out of the apartment, — Katara had left to visit Aang, anxious to tell him the news, and Gran Gran had finally picked up the book she'd been putting off reading, something about the newest technologies in the mastery of canning root vegetables (Sokka had promised himself to throw it out as soon as she leaves it — he hates root vegetables with an enviable passion).

It's that, in his parka, with his front strands braided and beaded, his dark brows furrowed and his boots too dirty to walk the halls of the Lotus, he doubts he'd get far. Besides, this place is bound to have metal detectors, and he is armed to the teeth. Sokka wishes that he'd brought cyanide. He wonders if anyone in Nox is as insane enough to find some for him the next time he decides to risk their necks.

He is on the verge of turning back, the cold sweat at the back of his neck urging him to do exactly that, when a woman with hair too well styled to have been done in one of Morye's so-called hair salons steps out through the glass doors.

Her eyes land on Sokka, and he, the stupid, _stupid_ boy, is frozen in place, watching the figure approach.

"Sokka?" The —unfamiliar, he reckons — woman asks, and _fuck_ , Sokka's screwed. Behind her, the warm glow of the White Lotus is as welcoming as much as it is threatening. She halts a few meters away, squinting her eyes. "You've been invited to the White Lotus. Would you like to come inside?"

He barely remembers the way through the glass doors and into the tigers' den; whatever is waiting for him at the top floor of the royal club house, the gun still strapped to his waist is an open door, and it calms him to the point of regular, faint breaths.

He'd never been this anxious, not even when he saw Zuko in the woods a few nights ago. Not even when his father closed the door behind him for the last time.

This was a shitty, shitty idea.

The elevator doors open with a soft ding, and the carpeted floor under Sokka's feet veers off its axis.

He'd been expecting this, but it shocks him all the same, the sight of the empty restaurant floor, panoramic windows and linen cloths, and The Great General, seated at its center with a serene smile on his face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I missed writing so much ahhh!!! I hope you liked this chapter <3  
> I don’t know why but this one has been one of my favorites to write. perhaps because I’ve missed it so much. Perhaps because we are getting closer and closer to :)))))) kissing :)))))))  
> anyways ily and sorry if this was kind of short the next one will be longer!


	16. and the only solution was fear

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The boy stays silent for a few moments. His eyes land on Sokka. "He can't come to the phone," he says, and a wicked smile plays across his lips. Sokka glares a up at him. "He's not exactly in the position to move right now."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi my angels!!  
> I hope you’re having a good start to the year, sending you all my love and thank you once again for your wonderful comments and feedback! I’m getting so into the plot that I’ve forgotten this is purely fanfiction lol sorry if this is very plot heavy... heh... it’s a SLOW BURN ;)))) but next chapter is even better I promise <33  
> and I promise it won’t take this long to update ;(

**CHAPTER XVI**

**SOKKA**

The streets are empty.

Alas, not only is it past midnight, but Sokka is taking paths and routes unknown to most Morye-borns, and certainly unfamiliar to the crowds of patrols Ogni sends out every night to find those breaching curfew and punish them.

The streets are empty, and Sokka isn't heading home; not yet.

The cigarette between his fingers leaves a trail of smoke that turns blue in the faint moonlight and snow glitters underneath his boots.

Alone, Sokka counts his blessings.

He is alive. 

There is no blood on his clothes.

No patrols are after him tonight.

Iroh is Nox.

It is thrilling to realize that the royal family has not one, but two traitors, and Sokka has come to known both of them; one is the son of a tyrant with a favor for bloodshed, and the other one is the Emperor's right hand.

Alone — always alone — Sokka plays back the words he'd memorized, the words the Great General of the West confessed to him in that ostentatious place he'd thought to be a trap.

It feels like scattering poison all over the devils of his grey world; it feels like victory in the midst of bloodshed.

He had walked into the White Lotus expecting everything but the leader of the Ogni army sitting in an empty restaurant; he had expected an arrest, and instead, Sokka got an ally. 

After the initial shock of the discovery had passed, questions began pouring out of Sokka as though he'd been holding them in all his life: about Nox, about Ogni, about Iroh's true intentions. He got little in way of answers, and he still doesn't understand why he had trusted the man so easily.

_"Ogni are not terrible," Iroh had said, hands splayed before Sokka as though to showcase the morality of his intentions. "It is the leader that corrupts his people. We had friends in Vozduh; we had lovers."_

_"Your Emperor killed everyone," Sokka responded. There was no comfort to him in alluding to what could have happened if a nation hadn't been obliterated. It was depressing to remind himself that Aang could have had a father and a mother, an uncle._

_A friend._

_Iroh held a pause, but it had been more politeness than anything else; a man of politics being courteous to his subjects, even if those subjects are scorched earth and corpses._

_"He did. Yet—"_

_"What are you trying to say?" Sokka leaned across the table then, elbows into the empty plates stacked eloquently in front of him. "You invited me here to tell me what I already know? Of course Ogni had friends and lovers in Vozduh. Morye had them, too. But from what I've gathered ever since—" he breathed around his anger, "—Ogni are a bunch of nationalistic murderers with too much power."_

_"Not all Ogni, Sokka."_

_"Not all Ogni?" Sokka scoffed. "You can't try to convince me that there was Nox in your country. Not with your leader."_

_"There was."_

_Sokka leaned back._

_"That can't be. All these years, we have been trying to contact you, and you never responded. If Nox does exist in Ogni, it sure as hell doesn't want to cooperate."_

_Something froze on the General's face, then, an expression Sokka had grown to loathe. It reminded him of the look of pity he'd received from the people that had known him after his father was taken away. It reminded him that he was too young. It reminded him of his own powerlessness; of his own incapability._

_"We had been trying to contact you here, in Morye, too. However, you must have heard of the operations the Altair had ordered to be carried out here a few years ago. Operations that culminated in the elimination and imprisonment of many. The Nox we had known had disappeared. The radio had been silent for years."_

_Sokka's head began to hurt from all the thinking he was doing, yet Iroh kept speaking._

_"I came here a few years back to learn that the reason Nox had not been responding was because the Nox we knew had disappeared."_

_"My father," Sokka said, almost an afterthought. It was far from that; his father's embrace haunts him where the prince steps away from his dreams. "He was taken."_

_"That Nox is long gone, I have come to realize," The General noted. "And I have gathered that you are it's legacy."_

_Legacy_ , Sokka mouths to the darkness. Is that what he is? A figure standing on the ashes of his father and the opposition that he had represented; not a perfect soldier, but rather a prince of his own.

He holds no crown, he knows: Sokka has bled too many times, and too many times has his blood been crimson instead of blue.

He holds no crown, but he has a gun, and he has two princes.

Sokka doesn't remember taking out the weapon hidden underneath the folds of his parka; it seems so natural to aim the barrel at a patrol marching a few streets down. Alone, in the shadows, he hides, seething, blooming an anger that has been suppressed for too many years; Iroh's words had opened up a wound he had been trying to ignore and it fucking hurts. 

The safety clicks, and he knows that the bullet will reach the head of the last man marching, and if not, his shoulder, or his rib cage. Either way, it will hurt. Either way, it will kill.

He feels like Suki aiming at the prince. To have control over someone else's life is a sadistic pleasure he didn't know he had within himself; this is what it must be like to bestow a deathsentence upon a criminal, even if that criminal is innocent.

"Three," Sokka whispers, and a smile tugs itself at the corners of his mouth. He imagines the man marching to be the man who had dragged his father away from him so many years ago.

"Two."

This place, it is cursed, and Sokka is cursed along with it. He cannot help it; he cannot help himself. He can only stay in the shadows, like this, and kill.

That is okay; that is his destiny.

"One," he whispers, but he hesitates, like a coward, _always a coward,_ and the footsteps approaching him from behind make him lose his concentration, and he lowers his gun, and the patrols march away, and—

"Fuck me, Sokka, you scared the shit out of me," Cyn hisses from the darkness. "What the hell are you doing here?" 

Before Suki, there was Cyn.

Sokka had never imagined having an infatuation with obtaining absolute control over someone else's body; but he had learned, through the brief encounters with his now co-oppositionist, that obtaining that control brought him a strange pleasure.

He still remembers Cyn, sometimes; when he's lonely, when Suki makes him jealous — she used to enjoy doing that in particular, until— well, until she decided to fuck up his plans and then proceeded to make his life extremely difficult.

Cyn's apartment is just as he had remembered; a comfortable kind of mess, warm light pooling between bookcases and plants that would have lived longer if not for their owner's own neglect. 

It is one of their few safe-spaces; Cyn makes it a priority to keep his apartment free from any sort of bugging, even if it means performing an obsessive procedure Sokka has witnessed a time too many.

The bedsheets feel familiar as Sokka falls atop them, too.

He decides to ignore that. They have never truly discussed his relationship with Cyn; it was something that was bound to end, one of Sokka's many no-strings-attached attempts at finding warmth within the sound of someone else's moans.

"The General, huh?" Cyn walks over to the window, drawing the curtain. The night gapes at Sokka, black and pleading, before a sheet of what used to be white linen obscures it from view. Please, it says. Here is my darkness. Use it.

Instead of responding, Sokka rolls over. It's always been like this with Cyn: he trusts him more than he trusts his sister.

"Take off that filthy parka, at least," Cyn groans, dropping onto the bed on its opposite side.

"Undressing me already?" Sokka mutters, but does as he is told. Then, closing his eyes, he finds the gun in the pocket of his trousers, a reassuring weight. It has become something of a talisman, a way out as much as a deadly weapon. A way out because it is deadly.

"The General as an ally," Cyn's voice comes out muffled. He's stuffed his face into the pillow. "Fuck me, it's been such a long day, and now this? Couldn't you wait until the morning? I won't be able to sleep because of this whole mess."

"I haven't slept in so long," Sokka whispers.

"What?" Cyn mutters. "Speak clearer. Or don't, I'm too tired to understand. And anyways, aren't we going to address the fact that this could all be a big fat lie?"

"I haven't told him anything about any of us yet," Sokka wraps himself into the blanket, and it smells so familiar, and he wants to forget everything he'd been told, he doesn't want to lead a revolution anymore, not when it's this warm in someone else's bed.

Cyn scoffs. "You and your martyr complex."

"I don't have a martyr complex."

"Yeah, yeah." Finally, one of them gets up from the bed. "Want some coffee? Also— do you want to stay the night, or something?" Cyn points his chin in the direction of yet another room that is filled with as much chaos as the one he's standing in. "I can take the couch."

Sokka considers it for a moment, and Cyn's eyebrows climb up his forehead.

"Unless you're worried about Suki taking this the wrong way?"

"I'm not with Suki anymore," Sokka cuts off. The idea of Suki is eclipsed by a notion greater than his fascination with her kisses, greater than his pain, than anger. It is the idea of the prince. To say that Zuko does not fascinate him is to lie, and Sokka hates liars.

"Again?" Cyn asks from the adjoining kitchen. The kettle begins to boil, and Sokka lets himself shudder. This is a place where he feels safe, a place where he can finally admit that he'd considered the idea of death today, once again, and he's terrified.

He's so fucking terrified.

For a few minutes, he lets goosebumps run all over his body. For a few minutes, he is just a boy.

The kettle stops boiling, and the room settles back into silence. Cyn returns, this time placing himself by Sokka's side. Two cups of steaming coffee rest by their feet.

"Whatever." Cyn's words are directed either at Sokka or at the ceiling. "I need a cigarette. I mean, the General? He's practically Ozai's lap dog. I don't have a good feeling about this, Sokka."

"I'm meeting him tomorrow," Sokka remembers. "And it doesn't matter. If it gives us the upper hand, I'm seizing the opportunity."

Cyn angles his head to face him. "Sokka—"

His phone begins to ring.

Both boys jolt up at once, Sokka far more disoriented than Cyn, whose nimble fingers fish out the burner from his parka on the floor and press the green button. Before Sokka can reach him, he's up, phone pressed against his ear, hand on Sokka's chest, holding him down.

"Give me that," Sokka wheezes at the same time as Cyn says a threatening " _hello_?" into the phone. Cyn's hand grips his shoulder— an order to stay silent. Sokka tries to get up, but the bed only seems to engulf him further.

 _God_ , Sokka thinks. The only person who could be on the other end of the line is the fucking _prince_.

For a second, all he wants to hear is the sound of Zuko's voice, and that desire is proof of his swiftly developing insanity. A fascination with the prince of the enemy state is just what he needs right now. 

"Sokka?" Cyn speaks after a pause, and his voice is somewhat amused. "He's all safe and sound. May I ask who's calling?"

The boy stays silent for a few moments. His eyes land on Sokka. "He can't come to the phone," he says, and a wicked smile plays across his lips. Sokka glares a up at him. "He's not exactly in the position to move right now." 

"Shut _up_ ," Sokka breathes. Does Cyn not realize how— _fuck_. "Cyn, this is—"

Zuko speaks for a few moments, most of his words far too cold to be questions, and Cyn's grin turns devious. "Oh?" He says, and Sokka considers committing homicide. "Fine, fine. You can have him."

He drops the phone into Sokka's outstretched hand before getting up. Sokka's death glare is returned by a wink. _Cute voice,_ Cyn mouths.

 _I'll kill you_ , Sokka mouths back, pressing the phone to his ear.

"Zuko," He says, but the name is a mere rasp, and he cannot tell why. He cannot tell why the expectation of Zuko's voice sends chills down his spine. 

He doesn't want to know.

" _Who was that?"_ The prince asks in lieu of a greeting, tenor a few shades sharper than Sokka remembered it.

"Nobody," Sokka says, as though Cyn is something reprehensible.

On the other end of the line, Zuko lets out a frustrated sigh. It is so unprincely of him, Sokka muses, to call so late. He wonders what his reasons are. 

" _Where are you?_ "

"What?" Sokka asks, dumbfounded.

" _Are you intoxicated?"_

"What? _No—"_

" _Then why is it taking you so long to comprehend my questions? I asked where you are and who you are with, and you cannot even deliver a coherent response."_

For a few seconds, both of them are silent. If Sokka didn't know any better, he'd say that the prince is... _displeased_.

"You surprised me," Sokka says, once his voice can be controlled. "You have no reason to call at this hour." 

" _Oh, please. It's not like you were sleeping."_

"I'm not liking your tone, your highness," Sokka warns. "What I would like is a reason for your call."

" _If you are going to mock my title, do consider the consequences._ " The prince's voice still holds a distracting edge. Cyn, in the kitchen, stands motionless, and Sokka can tell that he is listening in. _"I had a suspicion I needed to ensure was wrong."_

"A suspicion?"

Zuko ignores his question. " _What have you been doing since the evening?"_

Sokka wonders whether Zuko knows that he'd met his uncle merely an hour ago. 

It cannot be that the prince and the General are both traitors, and none of them know anything about one another. It would be far too cruel.

It would be too much fun.

"I've been thinking of blowing out the brains of one of your father's puppets," Sokka confesses, lowering his voice, but Cyn freezes in his peripheral, nonetheless. He's going to have to endure yet another lecture on his apparent murderous intent towards patrols. "Your interest in my whereabouts is concerning, to say the least."

" _I don't trust you, Sokka_ ," the prince says flatly. Sokka ignores the way his name sounds on Zuko's lips. He had heard it so much in his dreams. Too much. " _I am not going to ask again. Where are you and who are you with?"_

Sokka suppresses the desire to respond with something like I was just discussing revolution plans with your uncle. The initial shock of hearing Zuko's voice has passed, but a tenseness remains to his muscles, ever-present like the presence of danger, of Zuko.

"Has your shirt dried, your highness?"

" _Answer my questions."_

"You’re awfully paranoid tonight," Sokka says. He wants to pay the prince back with the same nonchalance he'd had about him back at the cafe, when he made Sokka dry his shirt. When he stepped back as Sokka fell.

 _"I am a traitor to my own nation_ ," the prince breathes out. "Being paranoid is the least I can do." There's a plea to his voice now. What a great actor Zuko is, to be able to feign desperation so naturally. _"Who was that on the phone, Sokka?"_

"Cyn."

" _Cyn?"_

"He is part of Nox. You will meet him soon," Sokka clarifies.

_"Is he a friend of yours?"_

Sokka looks back at Cyn, who stands, transfixed, just as he has done a few moments ago, and realizes that he'd never explained his involvement with Zuko to anyone in Nox. It is just that, to him, the idea of introducing a prince of the enemy nation to a bunch of oppositionists is not simply insane, but dangerous if done thoughtlessly.

"He's no enemy."

_“That is_ _not what I was insinuating."_

"What?"

_"Is our meeting still on?"_

"Yes, but about that—" Sokka begins, because, _well_ , it'd have to be cut short since he'd be meeting Iroh far too soon to stretch out their traitorous rendezvous. Besides, the fact that he prince knows nothing of his involvement with the General is becoming more and more apparent.

Zuko cuts him off. "Very well. I will call you tomorrow."

"Zuko—"

The line goes dead.

"Fuck," Sokka breathes out.

From the kitchen, Cyn lets out a humorless laugh. "It shocks me how freely the prince lets you speak to him, really."

"I'm always the one with the knife," Sokka says flatly, hiding the phone in the folds of his parka. Belatedly, he realizes that his fingers are shaking. "And nothing much to lose.

"You have everything to lose," Cyn says. "Our coffee's probably cold now."

"What did Zuko say to you?" Sokka asks, almost absentmindedly. He reaches for the cold coffee anyway.

Cyn's grin stretches even wider. He's back on Sokka's side of the bed, tanned arms stretching over his head like a lazy cat. 

"Oh, he was beside himself when he realized it wasn't you on the phone." Cyn's eyes narrow in amusement. "It was pretty entertaining."

"Beside himself?" Sokka shakes his head. "He's always like that." 

"Not like that," Cyn scoffs. "When he ordered me to get you on the phone— he sounded terrified."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoyed this! Once again, I’d love to hear your thoughts! Was Zuko jealous or...;)? And I wonder what he knows hehe  
> Sending you virtual hugs!


End file.
